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November 18 - November 20, 2025
A lesser spirit might have been embarrassed to have blurted her passions aloud in such a fashion, but clearly Miss Potter was beyond such weaknesses—or
(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
Hob greeted me more eagerly than usual, possibly because Denton’s horse in the next stall was a terrible conversationalist, or perhaps because the stable was so gloomy.
The house was obviously terrible for anyone who was sick. Miasma, as my great-grandmother would have said. Of course, it was 1890, and no one really believed in that anymore.
I couldn’t very well kidnap the Ushers and drag them back to Paris at gunpoint. Madeline wouldn’t survive. Roderick probably would, and be better for it, but Denton would undoubtedly object. And you can’t exactly threaten to shoot someone to save their life.
It must have been terribly galling to be barred from an organization merely because one lacked the proper genitals, when disreputable Americans were allowed to join and write about underwater mushrooms. I had encountered Englishwomen with similar feelings about the military. One of them had gone on to move to Gallacia and swear as a soldier, and more power to kan.
“That said, mushrooms are not the only fungus. There are many, many types in the world. We walk constantly in a cloud of their spores, breathing them in. They inhabit the air, the water, the earth, even our very bodies.”
“I enjoy the passions of others vicariously.
It’s less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.
There are people who sleep with a loaded gun under their pillow and I’ve nothing much to say about that, except that I would not choose to share a bed with them.
I have, as I have told you, reader, the psychic sensitivities of mud. It did not occur to me that I might be hallucinating, or that I might be seeing a ghost. Someone was walking through the halls at night and that someone must be real and alive.
idjit?”
The lake was full of reflected stars. The strange water gave them a faint green tinge, flickering slightly as I watched, probably from ripples. Not that the ghastly lake ever seemed to ripple when I watched. I looked up, away from the water, hoping to find an anchor in the familiar constellations. There were no stars. I believe I stared for at least half a minute, while this knowledge worked slowly through my brain. It was an overcast night. The sky was dark gray with a sliver of moon just edging through. I looked back down, at a lake full of stars.
Bioluminescent plankton.
Behind me, the lake continued to pulse and dance under the worried sliver of moon.
How many works on the life of Lord Byron does the world really need, anyway?”
gazing up at the bookshelves with their burden of rotting words.
Christ save me from Americans.
“Most of us go to the Devil without him having to personally oversee things.
I woke the second time to music. It was a glorious, layered composition, half a dirge and half a joyous melody, the notes weaving and intertwining like the flight of mating birds. I knew at once that it was Roderick. No one else in the house played at all, and I doubt many people on earth play like that. The notes Roderick coaxed from that piano were so far beyond my meager ability to comprehend that I can barely explain it to you. It was like sipping a fine vintage wine and knowing that there were complexities that you would never be able to taste, hidden depths that you could not understand.
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No, the most logical answer was that they were both in on it, that whichever one of them had killed her, the other had helped to cover up.
Hob, always pleased to have an audience, pretended that our great sliding halt had been his idea and pranced to show Miss Potter that she should be impressed.
This was a polite English way of saying that she thought I was a squalling lunatic, and I couldn’t argue the point.
Damnable English language—more words than anybody can be expected to keep track of, and then they use the same one for about three different things.
We cannot habeas the corpus.
(We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)
Fortunately Easton was fairly well-behaved—other than strong opinions about Americans—and kindly brought the history of Gallacia trailing in kan wake.
As writers say to each other, “Yes, it’s been done, but you haven’t done it yet.”
the problem with many fungus-takes-over-the-brain stories is that the interfaces are deeply incompatible, and I started thinking about how an intelligent fungus would deal with that. What would it be like the first time you realized that these creatures you were puppeting around communicated not by something sensible and straightforward like chemical messages or even photophores but by forcing air over their flaps and modulating the airflow? Light receptors in enclosed balls of fluid, okay, that’s not so weird, but everything’s wired backward and upside down and you have to figure out how to
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while I am usually skeptical of poets,
The sky was the color of a lead slug and seemed barely higher than the trees themselves. Combined with the wagon ruts that left a ridge down the center of the road, I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.
Also there are bears.
Angus grunted. He was my batman in the war, and now served as a combination valet, groom, and voice of reason. I inherited him from my father, along with my chin, my hair color, and my cast-iron liver.
I had been leaning on the windowsill, the smell of fresh bread wafting up from the bakery below my apartment, listening to the sound of two coachmen fighting over a fare. They had called each other the most extraordinary names, but because they were screaming in French, it sounded like a declaration of love delivered in the heat of a grand passion. Truly, Paris was the city of my heart.
