Emory came to the Fuller Dome the spring it opened, the way he came to most things in Mueller, on foot, early, with a notebook in his back pocket.
It sat at the north end of the lake trail like something set down from above: a geodesic shell of salvaged glass and steel struts, sixty feet across, with Strawbactus and muscadine climbing the lower panels. In the mornings it threw a long triangular shadow over the loop trail, and within a week the runners had started using it as a clock. Meet you at nine, at the point of the shadow. There were arguments about whether it kept good time. It didn't. It was slow in March and fast by May, and people kept arriving early to things, or late, and blaming the dome, and not minding.
Emory didn't come for the shadow. He came for the parrots.
There had been parrots in east Austin for as long as he could remember, a flock of green monk parakeets descended from someone's escaped pets, nesting in the light towers and shrieking at dawn. When the dome went up, they moved in. They built a nest the size of a car in the struts near the top and spent their days sitting along the steel triangles in rows, talking.
They talked like people. Monk parakeets can. They said hello and come here and good morning, and a word that sounded like the name of someone's dog. And they said, Emory noticed, sitting on the bench below them every morning with his notebook, other things too: things they could only have heard on the trails. Left at the bridge. Is it nine yet. Wait for me.
He began writing down where each phrase was said first. By June he had a map of the four-mile loop marked with the places people stopped to say things to each other. The parrots, it turned out, were keeping it too, in their own way. They repeated each phrase at the time of day it was first spoken. They were slow in March and fast by May.
The parrots of Mueller repeat whatever the shadows tell them.
He wrote that in his notebook on the last morning of June, because the birds had just said something he had never heard anyone say on the trail, something a person would say, he thought, years from now, finding their way: Turn twice at the creek. He sat on the bench in the long shadow of the dome until the birds went quiet for the heat, trying to decide where on the map it went.
🚮 W.A.S.T.E.: Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Ambrosia trifida | Giant ragweed. By late summer it is taller than you, and the whole city sneezes in its direction. The Botanical Gardens keep a patch by the gate, with a label. |
| Boggy Creek | The quiet creek in East Austin, the one the other creeks get mentioned instead of. Eli lives near it, with a lighthouse lens in his front room, eight feet of brass and prism catching the morning. |
| Bryce | He is in most of these, and not always the same one. At Lady Bird Lake he holds a folded paper like a hymn book. By the creek he carries a paper bag of spent tea leaves, and calls himself a lowercase artist. |
| Capitol Dome | The Texas Capitol’s dome, taller than the one in Washington. The Archivists camped under it the year the legislature stopped meeting there, and nobody has lit it since. Silva says it is an energy concentrator. |
| Elle West | A rebranded laundromat pretending to be a bar: kombucha on tap, pipes painted black, light too cold for comfort. Mid-cycle in Unit 14 the spin thins to a hum, a seam opens, and there is a hatch. |
| Floor 1 | The first floor of Central. Two grand doors face you: one carved with rivers and creeks, one with book spines, bookmarks and paper leaves. Past them, the plants. Pick one. |
| Fort Branch | A small waterway in East Austin, less famous than Shoal or Waller. It has been mended more than once, and now wildlife and neighbors both use it. |
| Future Austin | Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right. |
| Geodesic Dome | A shell of triangles that holds itself up. The one at the north end of the Mueller lake trail is sixty feet across, salvaged glass and steel, with Strawbactus and muscadine on the lower panels. Its shadow keeps bad time, and the runners use it anyway. |
| Icosahedra | Twenty-faced floats set in the creeks and the lake. Each face filters, and in the afternoon they throw the sunlight onto the water in pieces. The hawkers say they were blamed for the wrong thing. |
| Mueller | The old airport, a neighborhood with a lake now. The Fuller Dome stands at the north end of the lake trail, and a man named Emory walks the four-mile loop early, on foot, with a notebook. |
| Organic Media and Fiction | Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city. |
| Praisivores | Plants that eat attention and breathe out ornament. They glow green at boasting and amber at humility, and the block learns how little humility it had stored. Nobody chose them. We posted about it. |
| Shadow Sprawl | The unmapped city under the mapped one: tunnels past the loading dock, rooms that are not in the plans, a council that meets beneath the Library and is on no blueprint. It grows next to everything that was approved. |
| Shoal Creek | At the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands. |
| Skeletron | Sticks, cord, tension. Drill a hole in the end of each stick, tie the corners with square knots, and the shapes stand up by themselves. The original instructions say to build it up and down every river valley on the planet, and creeks. |
| Strawbactus | Green as a prickly pear pad and furred like a peach. Inside it is red and wet, and it tastes like a strawberry that spent a summer in the desert and came back changed. Mrs. Delgado eats the first one every year in her driveway and says it is not as good as last year’s. |
| Trails | What the parrots learned from the people on them: Left at the bridge. Is it nine yet. Wait for me. Emory has them on a map of the four-mile loop. |
| Trash Transmutation Tower | Two vertical gardens at Congress Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street, with a compass rose engraved in the walkway between them, one node on the W.A.S.T.E. network. Whatever goes in as waste is meant to come out as green building material. |
| Walnut Creek | Twenty-three miles, over limestone and then clay, to the Colorado. Ana pulled bacteria out of its mud and grew a film the color of weak tea that makes electricity out of humid air. |