Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [574]

“All right,” I said, not caring where he slept. I lay down on the bed without taking off even my shoes, and drew my body into a fetal ball on top of the bedclothes. I either fell asleep that way or I passed out again. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 574

Note

The two siblings’ fear is drawn with restrained contrast: Marcus’s request is whispered and childlike (‘I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care’), and her reply is four flat words. The detail of not removing her shoes, over the bedclothes, and the undecidable closing clause — asleep or unconscious, she can’t tell — leaves the state of the narrator genuinely unresolved rather than narrated from above. The fetal curl needs no interpretation.