Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [924]

I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered. Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 924

Note

The chapter’s opening image does double duty: the debris-free street is a symptom of total scarcity, not sanitation. The remembered line of Cory’s — ‘Poverty had made the streets cleaner’ — arrives as a wry domestic aphorism that the reader converts, on contact, into an index of collapse. Butler lets the reader perform the grim arithmetic rather than stating it.