Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [51]

So when I did decide that I had to fight, I set out to hurt the other kid more than kids usually hurt one another. I broke Michael Talcott’s arm and Rubin Quintanilla’s nose. I knocked out four of Silvia Dunn’s teeth. They all earned what I did to them two or three times over. I got punished every time, and I resented it. It was double punishment, after all, and my father and stepmother knew it. But knowing didn’t stop them. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 51

Note

The repetition of delivered injuries reads as clinical without being detached — the narrator’s flat list of broken bones is the sound of someone who has learned to describe pain instead of feel it. “It was double punishment, after all” is the chapter’s sharpest formulation: the protagonist’s moral accounting is honest and unforgiving, and her parents’ knowing complicity is stated without sentimentality.