Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [880]

I asked several people. Kayla Talcott said she had called them. I was grateful and ashamed. I wouldn’t have asked if Dad were still with us. One of us would have just called. Now we couldn’t afford to call. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 880

Note

The passage turns on a single verb doing double duty — ‘called’ as summoning the fire department and ‘call’ as telephoning before the money ran out — and in that pun the whole economics of the community’s decline lands. ‘I was grateful and ashamed’ is the emotional core: an admission that survival has made small humiliations routine.