Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [751]

“Harry will still be here,” she whispered, looking toward her house. I would have to stop thinking of it as the Garfield house. Harry and Joanne were at least as close as Curtis and I. I hadn’t thought about her leaving him—what that must be like. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 751

Note

The whispered line is broken up by the narrator’s own interior bureaucracy (‘I would have to stop thinking of it as the Garfield house’), so the grief arrives sideways, as a housekeeping task. Mentioning Curtis as the comparison does the real damage: Harry and Joanne’s separation is measured against the narrator’s own, which she has already survived. The kind of sentence that makes the narrator more present than the weeping would.