Sublime

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.

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough.

Ray Bradbury had already brought America’s racial anxiety to bear on space in one of his stories in The Martian Chronicles, “ ‘Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” where all the black people of earth leave in rocket ships for another planet.