Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [914]

I think they must have been pyro addicts—bald people with painted heads, faces, and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces; screaming mouths; avid, crazy eyes, glittering in the firelight. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 914

Note

The semicolon-chained fragments refuse to cohere into faces — a list of body parts without bodies, which is exactly how they arrive at the narrator. “Pyro addicts” as a hypothesis, then concrete paint colors as the evidence, so the abstraction and the image are doing opposing work in the same paragraph.