Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [435]

It’s hard to believe any household once had three cars, and gas fueled cars at that. But I remember the old garage before Richard Moss converted it. It was huge with three black oil spots on the floor where three cars had once been housed. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 435

Note

The garage’s origin story arrives through a child’s memory of evidence — three oil spots as fossil traces of an extinct abundance. “gas fueled cars at that” carries the whole vanished energy economy in an aside, and the repeated “three” (cars, spots, cars) makes the ruin feel rhyming and unarguable.