Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

What About the Nostrils and the Ears?

These important orifices are still a mystery; nearly nothing certain is known about the nostrils or the ears. The more we speak about these enigmatic absences, the further away we seem from any real understanding. It is an unusual bafflement to the American science of the head, and I have always been encouraged by my teachers and surrogate mothers to simply pause in silence if ever questioned about the true nature of these elusive areas. I stand with my head bowed and allow full reverence to accrue until my questioner understands how sacred is the lack of information about these parts of the head.

The Myth of Suffocation

A mouth filled with a bolus of wood or a full pound of linen does not necessarily mean the woman will not be able to breathe, only that her body, once blocked at the mouth and nose (and thus enabled elsewhere), will revert to its internal oxygen stores and alternative “breathing” methods, such as the “emotion furnace,” in which the body essentially burns its own anxiety for fuel when the mouth is clogged, rendering an emotion-free American citizen. After the initial panic of suffocation is surpassed, a feeling of relaxation and ease sets in, and a woman will notice her feelings rapidly quitting her body, bringing much-deserved silence into her heart.

Furniture for the Head

A chew stand should be established in the home. In time, it will become the essential emotion-quieting furniture for women. It can be a coat rack with a wooden ball at the level of a woman’s mouth, for her to approach and chew, several times a day, to leech herself of grief and rage. This cools the murdering impulse that sometimes occurs in a well-populated American shelter.

Alternatively from the chew stand, a wooden chew ball can be affixed to a doorway or window frame, so long as a woman can approach and fit her mouth over it without cutting or cracking her lips; it must not be too big or too small, nor should it be pliable enough for her teeth to diminish its size. If the height of the chew ball is incorrect, a woman will cramp at the neck or calves.

The chew stand creates an elegant opportunity for American women to pause in their daily lives within their homes and fill the largest chub of their heads with a finely polished wooden sphere. In this instance, wood is considered to be a meat, yet a durably inedible meat, a kind of pure protein that renews itself. A chew session can last for half an hour. If the sphere is cleaned between uses, many women can enjoy the chew stand, although identity compromises (relationships) may result, since wood can only leech so much heart static from the emotion banks of a female citizen and will start to “feed back,” flooding a woman’s mouth with the identity water of the last woman to chew on the ball.

Women of financial means, who are prepared to spend more money on their own behavior alterations, might consider posting an armed guard at the chew stand to prevent men and other fetishists from chewing and sniffing their wooden ball. A well-used wooden ball begins to smell sweet. Sometimes men will lie in wait, or they will carve tiny versions of their own heads and replace the balls with these. Many women will chew up a man’s head this way.

What Is Behavior Putty?

The residue a person leaves behind after performing certain tasks, like chopping wood, speaking to a crowd, buying a sack of nuts, or lunging through a Silence Hoop in an Ohio wheat field, can be collected in a jar, labeled according to the action that produced it, and then used as a topical ointment to prevent that action in others. It might technically be considered as a jelly history of life.

I am not sure why it is sometimes called “action butter,” but the term offends me and I would like to see its use forbidden. Butter is one of the most important items the world has seen, and to equate it with behavior is to deny its potency not only as a key form of animal water but as probably the most reliable soundproofing rub the American body can withstand without seriously harming the skin. Butter also lubricates a woman’s body to maneuver through American weather with a minimum of friction. She becomes a secret person within the wind. Without butter, a woman might be seen everywhere, pushed and pulled every which way. She would too easily be a target, plainly revealed and vulnerable to every kind of sighting.

THE FIRST OBSTACLE TO EXCELLENCE in women’s pantomime is the surplus of small bones in the face, feet, hands, and body. True mime is best done from a near-boneless approach, when the flesh can “rubber-dog” various facial and postural styles. The kind of mime most often produced by men with a full set of bones (a stack) is stiff and lumbering, hardly believable as an imitation of real behavior. There are simply too many nonpliable bones in the body to allow for the covert shapes and postures that lead to useful emotion purges. A woman who tries to mime away her excess emotions while operating with a full stack of bones will find little success. Only a “short stack” mime style can effectively contribute to the quiet heart.

The chief way to determine the gratuitous bone content in the female head (shabble) is to tap its surface with a facial mallet over an extended period of a month or more, using a mallet style more like worrying than actual smashing. Worrying the same area of the head with the mallet will eventually break down the excess bone matter, much of which is at the back or crown of the head, and it will pass naturally from the body, through the tears or saliva or sweat. Any bones that can be shed this way are not important to the life of the body, but are a disposable shell that simply needs to be cracked free and passed.

A small-boned woman who can add at least seven pounds of pure facial weight, without increasing mass to the rest of her body, would not need to remove any bones from her head. The added flesh would be sufficient for even the most elastic of mimes, including the pancake and the puddle styles. The best way to fatten the face through spot gaining is probably to drink cream at the rate of a gallon a day. Another option is a fat transfer from a richer area of the body, like the thighs or hips. With the fat transfer, the fat is brusquely massaged up the torso, into the head, then tied off with a tourniquet about the neck until the fat catches and takes root in the cheeks and around the eyes.

Barring these difficult methods, which only work with the small women, every woman can safely achieve a short stack of bone content by sacrificing several pounds of thin bones in the hands and feet, two rib bones, some gratuitous material on and near the spine (flak), the kneecaps, and parts of both shoulder blades. The bones, once broken, dislodged, and pulverized, can most safely leave the body from a bone exit zone introduced near the sternum.

Other bone removals are riskier, but the rewards of mime adaptability are all the greater. Removing a portion of the jaw-bone allows a woman to perform the hammerhead mime, good for quieting nearly all of the emotions, but envy in particular. Boneless hands can be pulled into excellent shadow shapes and silhouettes, enabling the chicken and the waterfall. The armless mimes of Geraldine include the weather vane and the elephant, not to mention the sleeveless John Henry. Since all teeth but the front two are disposable, their removal allows for inner-mouth and foreign-language mimes, which are widely effective with conditions of empathy and awe.

Given this rather dire recommendation for such an excess of self-surgery, it should be cheering to hear that the disposable bones, once broken and dislodged, don’t always have to be removed from the body; they can be migrated under the skin to the belly area, or pushed around into the excess flesh of the buttocks, where they will keep for months, provided the buttocks are regularly massaged and soaked in water. Restoring the bones to their original locations is easy; they can be shuttled through the skin until they arrive at the home area, then a body vise, a so-called Restorer, might be layered underneath a denim bodysuit for a week or so, until the bones have rooted again and returned to their former function.