Saturday Storytime: Bloodchild

Octavia Butler didn’t like writing short stories, but when she did, well, this one won basically all the genre awards in the year it came out.

“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. Why are you such a hurry to be old?”

My mother said nothing.

“I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care of yourself.”

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve – why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.

Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”

“Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she would not have permitted herself to refer to such things.

“Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.

“Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said, stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.

I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.

“Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”

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Saturday Storytime: Bloodchild
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8 thoughts on “Saturday Storytime: Bloodchild

  1. 2

    …You may want to put a trigger warning on this, though I’m not sure how one could without giving the story away. Let me just say that it’s a very disturbing story, and particularly important to those of us who feel strongly about gender roles.

  2. 4

    Thanks for posting this, by the way. “Bloodchild” is famous, it’s seminal, at the time I believe it was groundbreaking and controversial, and I’m glad to have a link to the entire thing. (Sent email, btw.)

  3. 5

    Ahh! What a great story. I feel creeped out, disgusted, and also like my mind has been stretched a little. Now I want to go back to reading more sci fi and fantasy, though it’ll have to wait until my exams are over. Thanks for sharing.

  4. 7

    Oh, I miss Butler so much. Every single thing she wrote, AFAIK, was a fresh look at things, a different angle, a walk into a dimension I’d somehow missed seeing all my life. She could scare the socks off me and simultaneously fill me with that same wondering thrill I get when I see a new bird.

    That story is one of my faves.

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