Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [791]

Then someone began to scream. I’ve never heard screams like that before—on and on. A man, screaming, begging, praying: “No! No more! Oh, God, no more, please. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, please!” Then there were wordless, grating cries and high, horrible mewling. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 791

Note

The quoted pleading is structured as a descent: articulate prayer, then repetition of a single name, then the loss of language altogether into ‘grating cries’ and ‘mewling’ — a consonant-heavy word that animalizes what started as speech. Worth keeping for how it stages cruelty as an audible degradation rather than a description.