We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom.

Constance laughed. “We don’t see many strangers,” she said. She was not at all awkward or uncomfortable; it was as though she had been expecting all her life that Cousin Charles would come, as though she had planned exactly what to do and say, almost as though in the house of her life there had always been a room kept for Cousin Charles.

“My niece Mary Katherine has been a long time dead, young man. She did not survive the loss of her family; I supposed you knew that.” “What?” Charles turned furiously to Constance. “My niece Mary Katherine died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister’s trial for murder. But she is of very little consequence to my book, and so we will have done with her.”