Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [870]

Thieves took all our store-bought food: wheat flour, sugar, canned goods, packaged goods… They took our radio—our last one. The crazy thing is, before we went to bed we had been listening to a half-hour news feature about increasing arson. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 870

Note

The devastating irony is built structurally rather than stated: the catalogue of stolen staples, the dismissive ‘our last one’ acknowledging how many radios have already gone, and then the reveal that the family had literally fallen asleep to a news feature about the very crime about to be committed against them. The ellipsis in the list enacts depletion — the inventory keeps trailing off.