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Big heavy snow flakes fall so silently and indifferent. Brown and black bears have hidden away, sleeping, dreaming of summer salmon and berries. Dirty mountains, once green, fatten at their apex with snow, beckoning gray dimness for months to come.
Years ago, the Housing Authority built all the heathen savages real homes. Rectangles. Dark, shit brown, fake wood paneling. No Carpet. Cheap Ivory colored linoleum. In one of the long hallways – alright the only hallway – sits a 70s style furnace. It exploded with a warning "tick," and burst into a roaring oil sucking dragon in a matter of moments.
It was an exchange. The American Father and his Son's told the Son's and Daughters of the Raven or the Kwatee or the Wendego to leave. Go. Walk this trail to your new home. Foundations for our homes are no longer simply the earth, but dead wood and rocks from lands not our own. We've traded homes. Welcome to your brand new shit brown rectangle.
The side paneling was redone recently. All the rectangle homes in the late 1980s began to sag on the outside. They looked like decrepit old trees, washed out and crumbly. The new side paneling was plastic and came in bright colors – white, pink, yellow, and blue. The dead and dying houses were covered up with bright plastic. People picked out the colors. They smiled. Look at my bright plastic house. People rotted with the walls of their rectangles.
Walk the dirt roads, they'll tell you. It makes a loop around the village landing strip – the road. The bright plastic houses grow mold on their edges. When Cessna's take off they scream like the wings of bees, throwing dirt and small pebbles behind. In the winter months their echo carries on forever. Filling empty, cold space, for an eternity.
To the Northwest side squats the shit brown school. For the longest time, a disfigured orange falcon, painted on plywood, was hung on it. I'd never seen a falcon. It was our mascot. We didn't have any reason for a mascot. We never left. People never came. Eventually, some friends got together with a latter and a crowbar to see if the orange plywood falcon could fly. Turns out – it couldn't. So they lit it on fire.
It's really just a small place with brightly colored rectangles and a shit brown school.

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