Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [974]

Little Robin Baiter, naked, filthy, bloody between her legs, cold, bony, barely pubescent. Yet she might have married my brother Marcus someday. She might have been my sister. She had always been such a bright, sharp, great little kid, all serious and knowing. Twelve going on thirty-five, Cory used to say. She always smiled when she said it. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 974

Note

The passage turns on ‘Yet’ — the atrocity is not allowed to stay a corpse in a list; it is forced back into the grammar of kinship and future tense (‘might have married,’ ‘might have been’). The last two sentences import a dead-or-missing woman’s idiom (‘Twelve going on thirty-five’) and then a smile, so the memory arrives with its own narrator inside it.