Bloodchild

by Octavia E. Butler

It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.

She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support.

I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help.

I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went further from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh.

poor girl

“No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.”

“The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.”

“It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.” Human lives. Human young who should someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it. I sort out my problems by writing about them.

Whether I write journal pages, an essay, a short story, or weave my problems into a novel, I find the writing helps me get through the trouble and get on with my life.

There’s one more thing I tried to do in “Bloodchild.” I tried to write a story about paying the rent—a story about an isolated colony of human beings on an inhabited, extrasolar world.

Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own?