Sublime

That’s when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

But the humans have her in their grip, and she’ll never get free again.

he reminded me of a mole or some other type of burrowing animal:

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

Leigh’s elm, Jean’s ash, Emmett’s ironwood, and Adam’s maple, each made from identical green puffballs.

But that is not a man, that’s a mushroom!”

dissolute,”