Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [927]

Sound. Footsteps. Two pairs of running footsteps. I stayed where I was, frozen in place. No sudden moves to draw attention to me. Had I already been seen? Could I be seen—a figure of darker darkness in an otherwise empty street? — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 927

Note

The clipped nominal sentences (‘Sound. Footsteps. Two pairs of running footsteps.’) move at the pace of the narrator’s own startle reflex, then relax into rhetorical questions. ‘A figure of darker darkness’ is the passage’s real find: a self-description that renders Lauren as a visual negative, presence measured only as an intensification of absence.