Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [693]

Three guys came over the wall and crowbarred their way into the Cruz house. The Cruz family, of course, has loud burglar alarms, barred windows, and security gates at all the doors just like the rest of us, but that doesn’t seem to matter. … The thieves used simple hand tools—crowbars, hydraulic jacks, things anyone can get. I don’t know how they disabled the burglar alarm. I know they cut the electrical and phone lines to the house. That shouldn’t have mattered since the alarm had back-up batteries. … And after the thieves used the crowbar on the door, they walked into the kitchen and used it on Dorotea Cruz’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 693

Note

Butler turns a single noun into a horror engine: the crowbar does door, then does grandmother, and the flat repetition of ‘used it on’ refuses to editorialize. The escalating security list (alarms, bars, gates) is staged only to be defeated, so the reader feels the defense collapse at the same pace the family did. The omitted sentence about the lemon grass tea sits between the pieces deliberately uncited — the tea is the sentimental detail the flat prose declines to italicize.