Sublime

Earlier in the century, most people lived on family farms that looked and smelled like rural factories. Survival was a matter of brutally hard labor and lots of kids. Houses were painted once when they were built, if at all; yards were full of garbage and foraging animals; soap was for clothes, not for people. Accelerating growth in the 1840s and 1

It was a flaking three-story house in the ancient part of the city, a century old if it was a day, but like all houses it had been given a thin fireproof plastic sheath many years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be the only thing holding it in the sky.