Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [230]

I think only Harry Baiter, Curtis Talcott, and Joanne had seen me shoot the dog. I looked at them and Curtis grinned at me. He leaned against his bike and in a slow, lazy motion, he drew an imaginary gun, took careful aim at the dead dog, and fired an imaginary shot. … “Pow,” he said. “Just like she does stuff like that every day Pow!” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 230

Note

The ‘slow, lazy motion’ of the pantomime sits in deliberate opposition to how the real shooting was rendered — instantaneous, involuntary, a blow. Curtis’s leisureliness is the whole point: he has the freedom to take careful aim at a corpse he finds funny. The mime also picks up the doubled verbs from the killing a few paragraphs back (drew, aimed, fired) and hollows them out. The broken line of dialogue, with ‘Pow’ both opening and closing and the stammering run-on between, lands the cruelty as tone rather than argument.