Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [87]

All three sisters are widows and between them they have twelve kids, all younger than I am. Two years ago, Mr. Yannis, a dentist, was killed while riding his electric cycle home from the walled, guarded clinic where he worked. Mrs. Yannis says he was caught in a crossfire, hit from two directions, then shot once more at close range. … His bike was stolen. The police investigated, collected their fee, and couldn’t find a thing. People get killed like that all the time. Unless it happens in front of a police station, there are never any witnesses. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 87

Note

The death is delivered as a flat ledger entry, then the sentence that lands is the bike — the murder and the theft given the same deadpan weight. The final line converts an atrocity into a statistic by way of a bureaucratic joke about jurisdiction, which is how the novel keeps its horror understated.