Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2178]

There should be something cheerful about sitting around a campfire with friends and a full stomach. We even had meat tonight, fresh meat. Bankole took the rifle and went off by himself for a while. When he came back, he brought three rabbits which Zahra and I skinned, cleaned, and roasted. We also roasted sweet potatoes that we had dug out of the garden. We should have been content. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2178

Note

The passage enumerates plenty in exact, sensory, sequential detail — rabbits skinned, cleaned, roasted; sweet potatoes dug — and the repeated “should have” undercuts every item. It’s the structure of the paragraph, not any sentence alone, that makes abundance read as a symptom: they have everything and feel nothing, and the bones over the rise are why.