Once, their O'Neal-fair skin would have been cause for comment in the historically black community. Not now. Time and migrations to and from the Nat King Cole SubUrb, along with the shuffling effect of the semi-random sweeps for shippers—as the involuntary off-world colonists were called—had shuffled the population into a spectrum from SubUrban spectral white Caucasians to dark brown, old-time Metropolitans, with a vast middle of cafe au l'asian. The landscape was a mixture of buildings. Bricks with early 20th century arched windows. Buildings with squared off pre-war windows. Crumbling brick, crumbling cinder block. Tattered strips of old stores. Boarded windows, and windows like haunted, vacant eyes. Row houses like shark teeth and blocky old four-story tenements. In front of one of the old strips of had-been neon and steel, a cart of fresh vegetables from a black-market hydroponics set-up sat upwind of a burnt-out sedan, whose trunk served as a shelf for piles of bagged tortillas, dimebags of cornmeal, the same of textured soy, and a large pile of slump cakes.
