this desire to mold something more than mere inert earth

What I’d taken for white beads are actually human teeth, mixed with white crystals I identified (via taste, to Mole’s horror) as salt. Mole looks at the mixture and shudders. I don’t know how to explain why I keep them. As much as I wish to deny the strangeness of our near-death experience…if some wyrdcraft did take place, this feels like a talisman.

The fact of the matter is that the basic acts of our species' survival - sex, birth, nursing - are discomfitingly sticky. They upset the rather delicate balance of mind versus body that we all, one way or another, have to achieve, sending the squishy-meat-sack side surging to the forefront in all its oozy, dripping glory. Werewolf stories expose this side of human existence, which we usually don't highlight. Werewolves excel at externalizing bodily fluids.

Get used to being held inside of her mouth completely.

Worlding, then, centers intimate and attentive relation to the text as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of our idea generation. In doing so, this anti-colonial epistemology releases the individual pressure of god-like creation that leads to extraction and dehumanization, and instead encourages engaging with SFF writing as a collaborative process with the world itself.

We didn’t think we’d make it this long, but there were others.

A light, he realizes, piercing the dark. It’s coming through the keyhole of the door leading to the living room. But how can it be? There’s no one else in the apartment—hasn’t been for years.

“Tired of unrelenting / slogans claiming to promote / social justice?”

Human and fungal lives alike are entangled with the world. They exist in relation to others, both human or non-human, and to the environments that they interact with. But interconnection is a fact of existence, not a value in and of itself.