Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [56]

If I don’t look too long at old injuries, they don’t hurt me too much. There was a naked little boy whose skin was a mass of big red sores; a man with a huge scab over the stump where his right hand used to be; a little girl, naked, maybe seven years old with blood running down her bare thighs. A woman with a swollen, bloody, beaten face… — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 56

Note

The paragraph enacts the very rule it states: a flat conditional about looking away, then a list that lingers anyway. The catalog moves child, man, child, woman with no commentary, and the trailing ellipsis is the sentence failing to stop rather than a stylistic flourish — the gaze the narrator says she can’t afford.