Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [249]

People toss us things sometimes—gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 249

Note

The cold catalog escalating from ‘maggoty, dead animal’ to ‘a bag of shit’ to ‘severed human limb or a dead child’ refuses to blink, and the flat plural ‘Dead adults’ does the rest — horror delivered as inventory. Then the pivot lands on the smallest word in the paragraph (‘outsiders’), whose measured distance from ‘one of us’ is the whole tragedy of the wall.