Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [375]

I told him. I was careful to keep my voice flat and passionless, but I didn’t leave anything out. I wanted him to know, to understand what I believed. The nonreligious part of it, anyway. When I finished, I stopped and waited. He seemed to expect me to say more. He just sat there for a while and stared at me. I couldn’t tell what he felt. Other people never could if he didn’t want them to, but I’ve been able to most of the time. Now I felt shut out, and there was nothing I could do about it. I waited. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 375

Note

The paragraph turns on a single withheld thing: the narrator’s lifelong ability to read her father’s face, which she has just lost. The repeated ‘I waited’ at the end (already planted mid-paragraph, then closing it) makes the silence feel like something endured rather than reported, and the flat, passionless voice she forces on herself is echoed in the flatness of the prose around it.