Bloodchild And Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

Author:Octavia E. Butler [Butler, Octavia E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Collections & Anthologies, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary, Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Feminism, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781583226988
Google: _uzLqSN-iEMC
Amazon: 1583226982
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2005-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Afterword

“Speech Sounds” was conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow. I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that. Here’s the story behind “Speech Sounds.”

In the early 1980s, a good friend of mine discovered that she was dying of multiple myeloma, an especially dangerous, painful form of cancer. I had lost elderly relatives and family friends to death before this, but I had never lost a personal friend. I had never watched a relatively young person die slowly and painfully of disease. It took my friend a year to die, and I got into the habit of visiting her every Saturday and taking along the latest chapter of the novel I was working on. This happened to be Clay’s Ark. With its story of disease and death, it was thoroughly inappropriate for the situation. But my friend had always read my novels. She insisted that she wanted to read this one as well. I suspect that neither of us believed she would live to read it in its completed form—although, of course, we didn’t talk about this.

I hated going to see her. She was a good person, I loved her, and I hated watching her die. Nevertheless, every Saturday I got on a bus—I don’t drive—and went to her hospital room or her apartment. She got thinner and frailer and querulous with pain. I got more depressed.

One Saturday, as I sat on a crowded, smelly bus, trying to keep people from stepping on my ingrown toenail and trying not to think of terrible things, I noticed trouble brewing just across from me. One man had decided he didn’t like the way another man was looking at him. Didn’t like it at all! It’s hard to know where to look when you’re wedged in place on a crowded bus.

The wedged-in man argued that he hadn’t done anything wrong—which he hadn’t. He inched toward the exit as though he meant to get himself out of a potentially bad situation. Then he turned and edged back into the argument. Maybe his own pride was involved. Why the hell should he be the one to run away?

This time the other guy decided that it was his girlfriend—sitting next to him—who was being looked at inappropriately. He attacked.

The fight was short and bloody. The rest of us—the other passengers—ducked and yelled and tried to avoid being hit. In the end, the attacker and his girlfriend pushed their way off the bus, fearful that the driver would call the police. And the guy with the pride sagged, dazed and bloody, looking around as though he wasn’t sure what had happened.

I sat where I was, more depressed than ever, hating the whole hopeless, stupid business and wondering whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists of one kind or another.

And the first line of a possible story came to me: “There was trouble aboard the Washington Boulevard bus.

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