Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2083]

I looked at her bruised, swollen face. Bankole had given her something for her pain. I was grateful for that, and half-angry at him for refusing to give me anything. He didn’t understand my numbness and grogginess back at the copse, and it disturbed him. Well at least that had faded away. Let him die three or four times and see how he feels. No, I’m glad he’ll never know how it feels. It makes no sense. That brief, endless agony, over and over. It makes no sense at all. I keep catching myself wondering how it is that I’m still alive. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2083

Note

The prose enacts the very thing it describes: the syntactically simple declaratives (“It makes no sense.”) repeat and circle like the hyperempathy-flashbacks they narrate, so the reader is caught inside Lauren’s obsessive return to the same fact rather than told she is traumatized. The irony sharpens too — she’s grateful to Bankole and angry at him in the same breath — and the abrupt swerve from resentment to compassion and back registers trauma as a disorder of feeling, not a content to be stated.