LITMIR.BIZ

      a family and a place

      HOWARD, AGE TEN, was doing a report on America’s two greatest natural wonders, the Heartland Grid and the Grand Canyon.

      “The Heartland Grid’s not natural, son,” Chad said.

      Howard gave his father an incredulous look. “It’s plants,” he said. “It’s how America feeds the world.”

      North of Dayton, Ohio, where Chad and Sharis (“It rhymes with Paris,” she said) Gribble and their sons, Howard and Leon, lived, there was a polymer fence close to twenty feet high, a fence that went forever, surrounding a dedicated agricultural area of over fifty thousand square miles. The Grid was roughly the shape of a nine-by-twelve casserole. Intentional villages dotted its landscape, roads crisscrossing it at ten-mile intervals.

      “We never fed the world,” Chad said. “We feed ourselves.”

      “I have pictures of the Grid,” Howard said, undeterred. “Miss Bishop says her father went there. He was driving a truck and he picked up lettuces. Only one time, but he got to eat there. He said they had delicious coleslaw.”

      “I’m sure all their food’s delicious. It couldn’t be fresher.”

      “They won’t let you spend the night. They say they have too much work.”

      Chad gave a noncommittal grunt. He didn’t believe that too-much-work line, not for one minute. He said, “The Gridians have always been clannish.”

      Howard shot Chad a questioning look. “They stick together,” Chad said. “They live in special towns the government built for them. They don’t have visitors or talk with other people. They don’t even mo-com with people who aren’t them.” He searched his mind for an example. “Kind of like the Johnsons”—their next-door neighbors, an older couple with a grown son.

      “They’re gone,” Howard said.

      “What do you mean they’re gone?”

      “The Johnsons moved out. Their house is empty. There’s furniture in there,

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