Brass, or the Northern Wisconsin Front

Leif Sjustrom finished a page long report on Charlemagne and handed the paper to his mother sitting over at a computer desk in the living room. He then headed to his mothers computer room and took his favorite rifle out of the wooden cabinet. He took it apart and cleaned it and put it back together and filled it with ammunition. He filled a little grenade pouch with some extra things and took off, gun in hand.

He picked up his bicycle from the sandy slope off the side of the house and hopped on, his rifle slung around his shoulder, and made his way across the deep rolling hills of the Northern Wisconsin Front. Eventually he came to a town called Trego, which was not like any town we now know, but merely a gas station and a bar and lumber mill and old snow mobile shop out of season. He crossed a little wooden bridge over the river and there was a large unoccupied white house on the other side past some trees and a little further down the road an old abandoned school complex.

It was a beige brick building, three stories tall with weeds grown up all around and windows broken in a few places. Leif made a loon call with his hands and Teddy poked his head out the window from the third floor, laughing and answering with a gurgling dove call. Leif walks through the sunlit hallways to a locker and spins the combination. A fluorescent light turns on and he takes out a cold bottle of soda before heading upstairs.

Oscar is sitting on a table polishing his rifle and his girlfriend Velma flips through papers delivered in the middle of the night by Railers. A bespectacled young boy lies on the floor reading through a book. Leif enters.

"Any of you guys know how to take out a tank?"

"Were working on it," Eli says, barely looking up from his book. The others nod.

"Heres the outgoing mail." Velma tosses a batch of letters on the desk. Mail comes into the snowmobile shop. Inside the addressed envelope is another envelope. These generally go between students and civilians. The postal service does most of the work.

"I made a reply to that letter from Chicago. You hear about A.B.U.?"

Eli puckers his lips and makes a long sound at the back of his throat like the echoing report of a fantastic explosion.

"Hell yeah we did. Its all over the place."

"They have no idea what they've got right under their feet."

"Hey Teddy, I want to get a little closer to that thing their building on Trudeau."

"Its a radio telescope," says Eli.

"Whats it for?"

"I guess thats what were going to find out."

American Haiku:

The Buffalo died
So that we might live
In gated communities