Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

  I won’t have to leave Dad now. He’s already left me. He was 57. What reason would strangers have for keeping a 57-year-old man alive? Once they’d robbed him, they would either let him go or kill him. If they let him go, he’d come home, walking, limping, crawling.

  So he’s dead.

  That’s that.

  It has to be.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2026

  The Garfields left for Olivar today—Phillida, Jay, and Joanne. An armored KSF truck came from Olivar to collect them and their belongings. The adults of the community had all they could do to keep the little kids from climbing all over the truck and pestering the drivers to death. Most kids my brothers’ ages have never been close to a truck that runs. Some of the younger Moss kids have never seen a truck of any kind. The Moss kids weren’t even allowed to visit the Yannis house back when the Yannis television still worked.

  The two guys from KSF were patient once they realized the kids weren’t thieves or vandals. Those two guys with their uniforms, pistols, whips, and clubs, looked more like cops than movers. No doubt they had even more substantial weapons in the truck. My brother Bennett said he saw bigger guns mounted inside the truck when he climbed onto the hood. But when you consider how much a truck that size is worth, and how many people might want to relieve them of it and its contents, I guess the weaponry isn’t surprising.

  The two movers were a black and a white, and I could see that Cory considered that hopeful. Maybe Olivar wouldn’t be the white enclave that Dad had expected.

  Cory cornered the black guy and talked to him for as long as he would let her. Will she try now to get us into Olivar? I think she will. After all, without Dad’s salary, she’ll have to do something. I don’t think we have a prayer of being accepted. The insurance company isn’t going to pay—or not for a long time. Its people choose not to believe that Dad is dead. Without proof he can’t be declared legally dead for seven years. Can they hold on to our money for that long? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We could starve many times over in seven years. And Cory must know she alone can’t earn enough in Olivar to feed and house us. Is she hoping to get work for me, too? I don’t know what we’re going to do.

  Joanne and I cried all over each other, saying good-bye. We promised to phone each other, to stay in touch. I don’t think we’ll be able to. It costs extra to call Olivar. We won’t be able to afford it. I don’t think she will either. Chances are, I’ll never see her again. The people I’ve grown up with are falling out of my life, one by one.

  After the truck pulled away, I found Curtis and took him back to the old darkroom to make love. We hadn’t done it for a long time, and I needed it. I wish I could imagine just marrying Curtis, staying here, and having a decent life with him.

  It isn’t possible. Even if there were no Earthseed, it wouldn’t be possible. I would almost be doing the family a favor if I left now—one less mouth to feed. Unless I could somehow get a job…

  “We’ve got to get out of here, too,” Curtis said as we lay together afterward, lingering, tempting fate, not wanting to lose the feel of each other so soon. But that wasn’t what he had meant. I turned my head to look at him.

  “Don’t you want to go?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you like to get out of this dead end neighborhood, out of Robledo.”

  I nodded. “I was just thinking that. But—”

  “I want you to marry me, and I want us to get out of here,” he said in a near whisper. “This place is dying.”

  I raised myself to my elbows and looked down at him. The only light in the room came from a single window up near the ceiling. Nothing covered it any more, and the glass was broken out of it, but still, only a little light came in. Curtis’s face was full of shadows.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked him.

  “Not Olivar,” he said. “That could turn out to be a bigger dead end than living here.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I don’t know. Oregon or Washington? Canada? Alaska?”

  I don’t think I gave any sign of sudden excitement. People tell me my face doesn’t show them what I’m feeling. My sharing has been a hard teacher. But he saw something.

  “You’ve already been thinking about leaving, haven’t you,” he demanded. “That’s why you won’t talk about getting married.”

  I rested my hand on his smooth chest.

  “You were thinking about going alone!” He grasped my wrist, seemed ready to push it away. Then he held on to it, kept it. “You were just going to walk away from here and leave me.”

  I turned so that he couldn’t see my face because now I had a feeling my emotions were all too obvious: Confusion, fear, hope… Of course I had intended to go alone, and of course I hadn’t told anyone that I was leaving. And I had not decided yet how Dad’s disappearance would affect my going. That raised frightening questions. What are my responsibilities? What will happen to my brothers if I leave them to Cory? They’re her sons, and she’ll move the earth to take care of them, keep them fed and clothed and housed. But can she do it alone? How?

  “I want to go,” I admitted, moving around, trying to be comfortable on the pallet of old sleepsacks that we had put down on the concrete floor. “I planned to go. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “How can I if I go with you?”

  I smiled, loving him. But…“Cory and my brothers are going to need help,” I said. “When my father was here, I planned to go next year when I’m eighteen. Now… I don’t know.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “North. Maybe as far as Canada. Maybe not.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?” Why alone, he meant.

  I shrugged. “I could get killed as soon as I leave here. I could starve. The cops could pick me up. Dogs could get me. I could catch a disease. Anything could happen to me; I’ve thought about it. I haven’t named half the bad possibilities.”

  “That’s why you need help!”

  “That’s why I couldn’t ask anyone else to walk away from food and shelter and as much safety as there is in our world. To just start walking north, and hope you wind up some place good. How could I ask that of you?”

  “It’s not that bad. Farther north, we can get work.”

  “Maybe. But people have been flooding north for years. Jobs are scarce up there, too. And statelines and borders are closed.”

  “There’s nothing down there!”

  “I know.”

  “So how can you help Cory and your brothers?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t figured out what to do. So far, nothing I’ve thought of will work.”

  “They’d have more of everything if you left.”

  “Maybe. But, Curtis, how can I leave them? Could you walk away and leave your family, not knowing how they would manage to survive?”

  “Sometimes I think so,” he said.

  I ignored that. He didn’t get along very well with his brother Michael, but his family was probably the strongest unit in the neighborhood. Take on one of them and you’ve got to deal with them all. He would never walk away from them if they were in trouble.

  “Marry me now,” he said. “We’ll stay here and help your family get on its feet. Then we’ll leave.”

  “Not now,” I said. “I can’t see how anything is going to work out now. Everything’s too crazy.”

  “And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kissed him. But I couldn’t distract him.

  “I hate this room,” he said. “I hate hiding to be with you and I hate playing games.” He paused. “But I do love you. Damn! Sometimes I almost wish I didn’t.”

  “Don’t wish that,” I said. He knew so little about me, and he thought he knew everything. I’d never told him about my sharing, for instance. I’ll have to before I marry him. If I don’t, when he finds out, he’ll know I didn’t trust
him enough to be honest, with him. And not much is known about sharing. Suppose I pass it on to my kids?

  Then there’s Earthseed. I’ll have to tell him about that. What will he think? That I’ve gone crazy? I can’t tell him. Not yet.

  “We could live at your house,” he said. “My parents would help out with food. Maybe I could find some kind of job…”

  “I want to marry you,” I said. I hesitated, and there was absolute silence. I couldn’t believe I’d heard myself say such a thing, but it was true. Maybe I was just feeling bereft. Keith, my father, the Garfields, Mrs. Quintanilla… People could disappear so easily. I wanted someone with me who cared about me, and who wouldn’t disappear. But my judgment wasn’t entirely gone.

  “When my family is back on its feet, we’ll marry,” I said. “Then we can get out of here. I just have to know that my brothers will be all right.”

  “If we’re going to marry anyway, why not do it now?”

  Because I have things to tell you, I thought. Because if you reject me or make me reject you with your reactions, I don’t want to have to hang around and watch you with someone else.

  “Not now,” I said. “Wait for me.”

  He shook his head in obvious disgust. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing?”

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2026

  It’s Christmas Eve.

  Last night someone set fire to the Payne-Parrish house. While the community tried to put out the fire, and then tried to keep it from spreading, three other houses were robbed. Ours was one of the three:

  Thieves took all our store-bought food: wheat flour, sugar, canned goods, packaged goods… They took our radio—our last one. The crazy thing is, before we went to bed we had been listening to a half-hour news feature about increasing arson. People are setting more fires to cover crimes—although why they would bother these days, I don’t know. The police are no threat to criminals. People are setting fires to do what our arsonist did last night—to get the neighbors of the arson victim to leave their own homes unguarded. People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

  Then there’s that fire drug with it’s dozen or so names: Blaze, fuego, flash, sunfire… The most popular name is pyro—short for pyromania. It’s all the same drug, and it’s been around for a while. From what Keith said, it’s becoming more popular. It makes watching the leaping, changing patterns of fire a better, more intense, longer-lasting high than sex. Like Paracetco, my biological mother’s drug of choice, pyro screws around with people’s neurochemistry. But Paracetco began as a legitimate drug intended to help victims of Alzheimer’s disease. Pyro was an accident. It was a homebrew—a basement drug invented by someone who was trying to assemble one of the other higher-priced street drugs. The inventor made a very small chemical mistake, and wound up with pyro. That happened on the east coast and caused an immediate increase in the number of senseless arson fires, large and small.

  Pyro worked its way west without making nearly as much trouble as it could have. Now its popularity is growing. And in dry-as-straw Southern California, it can cause a real orgy of burning.

  “My God,” Cory said when the radio report was over. And in a small, whispery voice, she quoted from the Book of Revelation: “‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils…’”

  And the devils set fire to the Payne-Parrish house.

  At about two A.M. I woke to the jangling of the bell: Emergency! Earthquake? Fire? Intruders?

  But there was no shaking, no unfamiliar noise, no smoke. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t at our house. I got up, threw clothing on, debated for a second whether to snatch my survival pack, then left it. Our house didn’t seem to be in immediate danger. My pack was safe in the closet, mixed in among blankets and bundles of old clothes. If I had to have it, I could come back and snatch it in seconds.

  I ran outside to see what was needed, and saw at once. The Payne-Parrish house was fully involved, surrounded by fire. One of the watchers on duty was still sounding the alarm. People spilled from all the houses, and must have seen as I did that the Parrish house was a total loss. Neighbors were already wetting down the houses on either side. A live oak tree—one of our huge, ancient ones—was afire. There was a light wind blowing, swirling bits of burning leaves and twigs into the air and scattering them. I joined the people who were beating and wetting the grounds.

  Where were the Paynes? Where was Wardell Parrish? Had anyone called the fire department? A house full of people, after all, it wasn’t like a burning garage.

  I asked several people. Kayla Talcott said she had called them. I was grateful and ashamed. I wouldn’t have asked if Dad were still with us. One of us would have just called. Now we couldn’t afford to call.

  No one had seen any of the Paynes. Wardell Parrish I found in the Yannis yard where Cory and my brother Bennett were wrapping him in a blanket. He was coughing so much that he couldn’t talk, and wearing only pajama pants.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “He breathed a lot of smoke,” Cory said. “Has someone called—”

  “Kayla Talcott called the fire department.”

  “Good. But no one’s at the gate to let them in.”

  “I’ll go.” I turned away, but she caught my arm.

  “The others?” she whispered. She meant the Paynes, of course.

  “I don’t know.”

  She nodded and let me go.

  I went to the gate, borrowing Alex Montoya’s key on the way. He always seemed to have his gate key in his pocket. It was because of him that I didn’t go back into our house and maybe interrupt a robbery and be killed for my trouble.

  Firefighters arrived in no great hurry. I let them in, locked the gate after them, and watched as they put out the fire.

  No one had seen the Paynes. We could only assume they had never gotten out. Cory tried to take Wardell Parrish to our house, but he refused to leave until he found out one way or the other about his twin sister and his nieces and nephews.

  When the fire was almost out, the bell began to ring again. We all looked around. Caroline Baiter, Harry’s mother, was jerking and pushing at the bell and screaming.

  “Intruders!” she shouted. “Thieves! They’ve broken into the houses!”

  And we all rushed without thinking back to our houses. Wardell Parrish came along with my family, still coughing, and wheezing, and as useless—as weaponless—as the rest of us. We could have been killed, rushing in that way. Instead, we were lucky. We scared away our thieves.

  Along with our store-bought food and the radio, the thieves got some of Dad’s tools and supplies—nails, wire, screws, bolts, that kind of thing. They didn’t get the phone, the computer, or anything in Dad’s office. In fact, they didn’t get into Dad’s office at all. I suppose we scared them away before they could search the whole house.

  They stole clothing and shoes from Cory’s room, but didn’t touch my room or the boys’. They got some of our money—the kitchen money, Cory calls it. She had hidden it in the kitchen in a box of detergent. She had thought no one would steal such a thing. In fact, the thieves might have stolen it for resale without realizing that it wasn’t just detergent. It could have been worse. The kitchen money was only about a thousand dollars for minor emergencies.

  The thieves did not find the rest of our money, some of it hidden out by our lemon tree, and some hidden with our two remaining guns under the floor in Cory’s closet. Dad had gone to a lot of trouble to make a kind of floor safe, not locked, but completely concealed beneath a rug and a battered chest of drawers filled with sewing things—salvaged bits of cloth, buttons, zippers, hooks, things like that. The chest of drawers
could be moved with one hand. It slid from one side of the closet to the other if you pushed it right, and in seconds you could have the money and the guns in your hands. The concealment trick wouldn’t have defeated people who had time to make a thorough search, but it had defeated our thieves. They had dumped some of the drawers onto the floor, but they had not thought to look under the chest.

  The thieves did take Cory’s sewing machine. It was a compact, sturdy old machine with its own carrying case. Both case and machine were gone. That was a real blow. Cory and I both use that machine to make, alter, and repair clothing for the family. I had thought I might even be able to earn some money with the machine, sewing for other people in the neighborhood. Now the machine is gone. Sewing for the family will have to be done by hand. It will take much more time, and may not look like what we’re used to. Bad. Hard. But not a fatal blow. Cory cried over the loss of her machine, but we can get along without it. She’s just being worn down by one blow after another.

  We’ll adapt. We’ll have to. God is Change.

  Strange how much it helps me to remember that.

  Curtis Talcott just came to my window to tell me that the firemen have found charred bodies and bones in the ashes of the Payne-Parrish house. The police are here, taking reports of the robberies and the obvious arson. I told Cory. She can tell Wardell Parrish or let the cops tell him. He’s lying down on one of our living room couches. I doubt that he’s sleeping. Even though I’ve never liked him, I feel sorry for him. He’s lost his house and his family. He’s the only survivor. What must that be like?

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2026

  I don’t know how long it can last, but in some way that I suspect is not quite legal, Cory has taken over part of the job Dad held for so long. She’ll give the classes Dad gave. With the computer hookups we have already in place, she’ll issue assignments, receive homework, and be available for phone and compu-conferences. The administrative part of Dad’s work will be handled by someone else who can use the extra money, and who is willing to show up at the college more often than once or twice a month. It will be as though Dad were still teaching, but had decided to give up his other responsibilities.