Since that first foot, I have found it hard to resist having more made when I can afford it, or carving them myself. In my more whimsical moments, I’m tempted to leave a trail of feet through the city. One day a foot may be all that is left of me.

“Do you like it?” I asked Duncan the first time I showed it off to him.

“It’s very much you,” Duncan said. (I’d had too many strange experiences with my flesh to be too empathetic. The sloughing off of flesh, the losing and regaining of it, had become too normal an experience.)

“It itches,” I told him. And this is still true now. The foot, with its lithe straps and silver clasps, itches like hell at the oddest times.

“I itch all the time,” Duncan said, not to be outdone.

On that particular day, down by the docks, watching the ships come in, Duncan was very pale. You could see, if you looked closely, that the hair on his head was not really hair ruffled by a breeze, but a black fungus lazily swaying back and forth. There was a further suggestion of movement under his coat. I doubt anyone else saw it—or wanted to see it.

“Do you miss him?” I asked Duncan.

“I miss him terribly,” he replied. (I missed the everyday normalcy Sybel had brought to my life. Dealing with you, Janice, was an up-and-down experience, often full of melodrama. As much as I loved Bonmot, my conversations with him had always had some religious subtext. But speaking to Sybel was so natural and effortless and free of judgment that I didn’t even miss the experience until it was over.)

“If it itches really badly,” he said, “I could probably find a way to grow you a fungal replacement.”

I ignored him and asked, “How’s Mary?”

He didn’t answer.

I had to stop to clean off the typewriter keys. The green fungus had become too insidious. The keys weren’t striking paper, but bunching up in emerald moss, the paper itself reflecting a series of ever more vegetative marks. I couldn’t get it all off, but enough of it is gone that I can continue typing for a while. I’m not sure when I will run out of time; there are so many factors to consider. When will the patience of the Spore’s owner run out? When will I tire of what increasingly seems a pointless exercise? When will something crawl out of the hole in the ground behind me and put an end to my speculations?