Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [317]

I lost patience. “Then let’s kill ourselves now and be done with it!” … She frowned, her round, too serious face almost angry. She tore bits of peel from a small navel orange. “What then?” she demanded. “What can we do?” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 317

Note

The chapter’s sharpest turn runs on a mismatch of registers: an adolescent’s furious either/or flung at despair, answered by the slow domestic business of peeling an orange. ‘Her round, too serious face’ carries the whole characterization of the friend in four words, and ‘What then?’ refuses the rhetorical escalation instead of meeting it.