Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [774]

Nothing. He isn’t under arrest or sick or injured or dead—at least not as far as anyone knows. None of his friends or colleagues had seen him since he left work early this morning. His bike was working all right. He was all right. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 774

Note

The catalogue of negations is built to exclude every survivable explanation, so the list ends by cancelling the only reassurance available: “He was all right” arrives as past tense, already a eulogy the speaker has not yet admitted she is writing. The bureaucratic flatness of the clauses is the craft — grief rendered as a missing-persons checklist.