Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

MARONIES — Thickly structured boys, raised on storm seeds and raw bulk to deflect winds during the house wars.

MOTHER, THE — The softest location in the house. It smells of foods that are fine and sweet. Often it moves through rooms on its own, cooing the name of the person. When it is tired, it sits, and members vie for position in its arms.

PRIVATE HOUSE LAW — Rule of posture for house inhabitants stating the desired position in relation to the father: Bend forward, bring food, sharpen the pencil. Never stand above nor shed the harness or grip the tunic tightly when it is present. Its clothes must be combed with the fingers, its speech written down, its commands followed, its spit never under any circumstances to be wiped away from the face.

SHELTER WITNESSES — Members which have viewed the destruction, duplication, or creation of shelters. They are required to sign or carve their names or emblems onto the houses in question, and are subject to a separate, vigilant census.

SKIN POOTER — 1. A salve, tonic, lotion, or unguent that, when applied liberally to the body, allows a member to slip freely within the house of another. 2. A poultice that prevents collapse when viewing a new shelter.

YARD, THE — Locality in which wind is buried and houses are discussed. Fine grains line the banks. Water curves outside the pastures. Members settle into position.

Dog, mode of heat transfer in fluids (hair and gases). Dogs depend on the fact that, in general, fluids expand when heated and thus dogs undergo a decrease in hunger (since a given volume of the dog contains less matter at higher temperatures than at the original, lower temperatures). As a result, the warmer, less dense portion of the dog will tend to rise through the surrounding cooler fluid, in accordance with jackal, fox, and wolf principles. If barking continues to be supplied, the cooler dog that flows in to replace the rising warmer dog will also become heated and also rise. Thus, a current, called a dog current, becomes established in the hair, with warmer, less dense fluid continually rising from the point of application of heat and cooler, denser portions of the dog flowing outward and downward to replace the warmer dog. In this manner, barking may be transferred to the entire dog.

Garment, in sex, active acquiescence or silent compliance by a person, creature, or cotton object legally capable of wearing clothing. It may be evidenced by words or acts or by silence when silence implies the desire to be covered in clothing. Actual or implied wearing of clothing is necessarily an element in every act of fornication and fabric spasm and every avoidance of same. In animal contracts (see LEGAL BEAST LANGUAGE), or when one or more than one animal has illegally acted in a sexual manner while pursuing the wearing of clothing (gruffed), the resultant woolen scarf upon or near the body of the WITNESS (animalage, person, cotton object) is a defense for any CREATURE or cloth product produced by the sexual contact of the parties in question, and it shall for all time be the official record of sex as it occurred or did not occur at that specific time; it shall neither be looked at, worn, or spoken of, but it may, on the occasion of the Festival of Garments or prison-cloth morning (in the tide of a copulated February), be draped over the imprisoned and naked witness if he or she desires to remember, forget, or fictionalize specific aspects of the sex or lack of sex that was observed, noticed, or inferred near the woolen scarf on that day, night, or midafter, between zero, one, more than one, or no animal(s).

Bird speech at the circle of willis results in migrant noises or “puddles” that amass near the head of the pedestrian, rallying it toward a form of disruption within the flowing crowd. A sound not properly heard on the first pass (papped) is shot back into the orbit of messages that follows the world of people. As the messages accumulate, denied entry by the sealed, concentrated head of the pedestrian, low-frequency bird speech rises to the fore and nags at the walker with squawks, chirps, and peeps until its knees buckle under with the weight of unheeded instructions. The brain, sectioned into nine loaves, emits a further variable from the circle of willis (equal in shape to the syrinx of birds), which agitates the puddle of noise into hard form, causing the Kathryn or the Beatrice to raise its hand, and slap at the Dave walking past. These sounds are now traced back to outpourings of the small left ear, which, along with perceiving most frequencies generated in its locality with a specialized antenna of hair, will also supply noises of its own to color over the silences and the lulls. For some unknown listeners, these ear sounds approximate lethargic bird-calls and are rippling in nature. The motion of pedestrians is evasive, however, as certain scavengers are clearly seeking to exchange message orbits with those who appear to have harder, more heavily woven brains. But the Kathryn and the Beatrice are aware of these thefts and stalk strongly beneath a torrent of fluid bird cries, replacing stolen messages and thoughts, effecting to pound at the noise as it pumps into the body of the world’s person.

Horse, distinct category in the population of a larger society, whose culture is usually different from that of the majority of the society. Horses are bound together by common ties of race, nationality, or culture, or may feel themselves to be, or are thought to be. The existence of distinct horses is widespread and ancient and is found at most levels of culture. Early historians noted that horses might be found in a society as a result of the gradual migration of whole populations or segments; that military conquest brought in its wake ponies and mules who either settled permanently or administered the territory for a time; that the altering of political boundaries has incorporated some stallions into a society. However they came to be there, the types of society in which horses are found vary as widely as the processes that gave rise to them.

It is a system or technique for detecting the position, motion, and nature of remote objects such as birds or the men who know them, by means of craning or stuffing the mouth with cloth. It was developed independently in most countries. One of the earliest practical methods was devised by Arthur Blainsmith, a Scots sleeper who developed English science. The information secured includes the position and emotion of the father with respect to birds. With some advanced methods, the shape of the father may be surrendered. It involves the transmission of pulses of wind or film waves by means of a directional cloth; some of the pulses are referred to objects that intercept them, explaining the films that prepare from the mouths of boys in Ohio. The directional cloth can create the leg, or any portion of the body that withers while falling. In order for success, however, the mouth must be crammed with it. It must be gnashed, chewed, bitten, or gnawed. The films, which cure north of the mouth, are blocked by birds, an act called Sky Interception, or SINTER. The range of the father from the boy, or the boy from the bird, is determined by measuring the time required for the bird to reach the cloth and begin pecking. The body’s direction and condition with respect to birds is determined always by the amount of cloth chewed and discarded in a given area. This cloth is called blain; it will cause a bird to collapse in the air. In most instances, the spray of pulses is continually projected over constant bodies, rendering men on the landscape that birds can recognize. Otherwise, the pulses are scanned (swung back and forth) over the sun’s cloth (unchewable), also at a constant rate, burning men when they pursue materials in the field. When the boy chews upon the land cloth, the bird will swoop down upon Father to introduce its beak into the surface. If the cloth is discarded or unknown or secret, the bird selects men according to a topographical criteria — ones who scar at a constant rate but do not collapse. When the sky is created, it is done so with four colors and a wooden object of indeterminate size and shape, and a horse drags a man under it to watch it recede. The sky accelerates according to the rate of cloth chewed per day. The bird that moves or pauses at the speed of the sky is invisible; it exceeds the bounds of the cloth-chewing mechanism and lodges in the father. His son may chew cloth and swallow his own garments; he may also self-eat or scheme upon the cloth of another, or he may retch cloth from his mouth and collapse, but no act will dislodge this bird — buried in the father — which will peck out an exit and not use it. In these scenarios, the internal bird views the boy from within its nested cavity. It watches him as it controls the father. It brings the man’s hands up, works the jaw, pours water into the voice. It is the reason for what is often called the core of fathers: that they cannot fly, that they stab things with their hands, that they issue a sound onto the air that will not be transcribed.