Fledgling

by Octavia E. Butler

Copyright © 2005

Octavia E. Butler, 1947-2006, this is her last novel (2005). Bought for $11 on February 16, 2022 to further my reading of this wonderful author. It will be her 7th novel that I’ve read since 2019. Reading Feb. 20-24, 2022; and again for Zoom course with Nisi Shawl at the 92d Street Y on 9/7 and 9/14, 2023. Another brilliant, enticing, meaty-but-tender, and exciting novel from Octavia Butler. So glad I found her when I retired. The ethos and ethics suggests she’d been reading Heinlein. A fantasy of another race, outsider and reviled, but much more ancient and much more powerful than humans, A murder mystery involving mass murder to kill one person, and that person is the narrator, but also (to keep within the genre trope) the strangest hard boiled detective imaginable. Full of small-scale humor, wry

But she knows there are those things to know, so she’s not tabula rasa.

and I decided that it was time for me to go.

It had been a good place to hide and heal.

by category—

it suddenly occurred to me that my feet were bare.

I knew I should be dressed.

My skin was scarred,

hair. I had touched my head, expecting hair.

Somehow, I had been hurt very badly, and yet I couldn’t remember how.

Again, I was remembering things—fragments—understanding a little of what I saw, perhaps just because I saw it.

comfortable homes for several people. That felt right. It felt like something I would want—living together with other people instead of wandering alone. The idea was a little frightening, though.

Somehow, I had expected to find food here. And yet I remembered nothing about this place.

the most general way—

I wanted clothing badly. I felt very vulnerable without it.

I scented a doe. I stalked her,

curiosity and restlessness

I remembered the word “road,”

remembering cars and trucks,

a third still wider road.

It couldn’t have been the first car I had ever seen.

But it was the first car I could remember seeing.

I realized that I should answer. I couldn’t remember ever speaking to another person,

I surprised myself completely by instantly wanting to go with him.

I felt almost as hungry for conversation as I was for food.

I knew absolutely that I didn’t want to put myself into the hands of strangers.

Being turned over to the police scared me even more than the idea of going to the hospital did.

Haha

I understood him a little better now

that I’d had my hands on him.

not pulling away at all now, but looking as though he wanted to—or as though he thought he should want to.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said. “It feels good. Which is weird. How do you do that?” “I don’t know,” I told him. “You taste good.”

I felt pleased, felt myself smile. That was right somehow.

“Renee,”

“A friend of mine told me it meant ‘reborn.’ That’s sort of what’s happened to you.

“Just right for a vampire,”

Haha

“Good God,” he said. “Are those what you bit me with?”

Haha

Wright Hamlin

Taking Wright’s blood had been the most satisfying thing I could remember doing.

I recognized all these things as soon as I saw them.

Are you sure you’re female?” “I’m female,” I said. “Of course I am.”

How does she know?

I tried to see someone I recognized.

how was it that I could recognize a refrigerator, a sink, even a mirror, but fail to recognize my own face in the mirror?

I had the feeling I should be able to make his scars go away too, but I didn’t know how.

The wound seemed to me to be healing as it should, but he snatched his arm from me and examined the hand. “It’s already healing!” he said.

His words triggered something in me—a memory. It felt real, true.

“All I need is fresh human blood when I’m healthy and everything’s normal. I need fresh meat for healing injuries and illnesses, for sustaining growth spurts, and for carrying a child.”

Maybe now, with you to help me, I’ll remember more and more.”

eating things that I recognized first by scent then by sight.

I hadn’t hurt him. That was more important to me than I’d realized.