The Belonging Kind is a science fiction short story written by the cyberpunk gurus William Gibson and John Shirley. It is a story about a man, a rather lonely and monotonous linguistics teacher, that wandering around in bars falls in love with a woman that seems to fit in every place.
[Spoiler-Close your eyes
That woman lives only by alcohol, creates her own money and transforms according to the bar that she visits. This woman, this “human wallpaper”, belongs to a kind that is not the human one. This is the belonging kind that has many members. Coretti slowly becomes one of them.]
The film noir feeling, the detective story elements, the decadence atmosphere, the high tech femme-fatal and the nihilist hero, make this story one of the most original of the cyberpunk genre.
The story can be found, among other short stories, in the collection Burning Chrome.