Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [245]

I didn’t doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges—one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amy’s scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 245

Note

The chapter’s gentlest passage, and its most heavily loaded: two oranges peeled and shared, rain as abundance rather than threat. ‘Grazing’ and ‘trying to let the rabbits out’ sketch Amy as semi-feral in one stroke, and the final image of plastered hair pre-figures her death in the paragraph that opened it — pleasure and foreboding in the same breath.