Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [848]

“I could get killed as soon as I leave here. I could starve. The cops could pick me up. Dogs could get me. I could catch a disease. Anything could happen to me; I’ve thought about it. I haven’t named half the bad possibilities.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 848

Note

The anaphoric ‘I could’ builds a litany of catastrophes that gains force precisely from its flatness — no adjectives, no dramatizing, just a bare list of ways to die. Then the closing line undercuts the list’s seeming exhaustiveness (‘I haven’t named half the bad possibilities’), which is the interesting turn: the speech is not a confession of fear but a demonstration of how thoroughly fear has already been reasoned through.