Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [519]

Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there’s nothing you can do to make it happen faster. Poor Keith. Poor me. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 519

Note

A twelve-year-old’s aphorism slid in without quotation or framing: the abstract formulation (waiting to be older as a distinct, worse species of waiting, because it is the one thing effort cannot shorten) is earned by the flat three-beat ending. The doubled ‘Poor Keith. Poor me.’ turns the general observation into a confession of the narrator’s own hunger to be older — the same restlessness that will drive Keith out the gate a few paragraphs later. Craft: sentence two expands, sentence three collapses to four words.