Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

After he died, they spoke to his body. A girl used her wagon to carry fruit from the hillside. Women pedaled bicycles down the road. Towers were built from wood and fastened together with wire. A boy was born blind, and the girls massaged his legs. In the winter, they held a day of singing before sealing their doors. Men transported grass to their doorways. Rice was hauled on sleds to the windows of their houses. The girls placed pebbles on his grave and pressed their faces in it.

There were seven houses there, then ten, then twelve. Wires were erected in the spring. The sky was clean, and bugs died in the light. They emerged and hammered flax into cloth. No one died for four years. They practiced writing. A boy appeared on the road. They sealed their door frames with cracked glass and glue. The wind moved slowly and could be seen chopping at the grass. No one could sleep. Birds glided in the air and chattered. Frost enveloped everything, and a boy moved about their houses, prodding the earth for holes while they lay in their beds. He carried a wire. He scratched into the ice on their walls. He pressed his ear to the ground. He looked up at it. Sun, wire, hair, house, river, hole. Cloth. He examined the tombstone. He sat under the scaffold. His hand was open. He had clear eyes. He held his wire to it.

Continuous winter, in law, alteration of the provisions of a season. The term usually refers to the extension of a SNOWBANK or an ICE CAP, but it is also applied in TEMPERATURE LAW to proposed changes of a climate or windchill under consideration and in judicial (procedure) to the correction of frost. A statute may be amended by the passage of an act that is identified specifically as freezing, or by a new statute that renders some of its ice sheets nugatory. Written forms of winter, however, for the most part must be amended by an exactly prescribed procedure. The SCHEDULES AND DISPENSING RULES OF SEASONS, as provided in Article 3, may be amended when the Season Assembly decides. Again, written forms of winter are the most severe, essentially colder and more realistic than those encountered while outdoors, and can pull the so-called LIVING into long, continuous periods.

Girl burned in water, supplementary terms help or X , basic unit of religious current. It is the fundamental spiritual object used with the X -water (burnable) system of units of the GOD-BURNING SYSTEM. The girl burned in water is officially defined as the current in a pair of equally long, parallel DROWNING WIRES one river apart that produces a force of o—1 girls between the wires for each fire that occurs in the water. Current meters such as the burnable girl (equipped with help message) are calibrated in reference to a drowning balance that actually measures the speed of a river in which X amount of girls have burned while conducting religious transmissions along a wire. Until recently, the river was defined as the flow of one God charge per flammable wire, the God charge being then considered the fundamental unit to incite burns. Now it is commonly known that the river generates X to satisfy its own fires, where X negates the charge of God by issuing claims for help across the sunken drowning wires, an act that generates a blue or gray spasm (fire) over the body of a girl in the river, which cools and burns at a steady rate, according to the hidden greatness of X .

Our mother, a Catholic stone-writer, carver of the form, published a book at Albany in the year 1989 concerning the weather used underground. In it, we can find (taken from Ruth Connor, her mother) the true cure of many weathers, including the hail-bed ripplings, backward wind, yellownesses, and nonvertical rain.

p. 41—For if you shall enclose the warm wind of a storm in the shell and white of an egg, which is heated on the boneless coating of the belly, and this wind, being mixed with the hair of a storm witness, you give to a hungry boy, the weather departs from the sky into the boy.

No otherwise than the hurricanes of Poughkeepsie passed over into Jason through the execration of Mrs. Marcus.

p. 210—If He would develop an act at the door, and the weather would be prevented in the end times, take the arm red-hot from the sleeve of the shirt if it is burning, or the bone from the skin if it is fallen, and put it into the wind. By meteorism, His wind will develop rocks and actions to the east, and his breath will circle his own face in a burning motion until his gestures are collapsed into the sun.

Survival is indeed impossible lest we make a small house of the lightest, whitest, and basest kind of boy’s hair. At the door, it is our requirement to place a piece of rock from the latest storm. We apologize if this is against her own ideas. On the rear porch, we must in due time lay a sleeve and a button from the sleeping gown of a boy. The waiting period is comprised of stones and slow air. We shall often be stabbed by water. We will pray for a garment to come among us. When it surrounds the sleeve, seams will border the button, and we will wait for the man to enter his clothing. It will be the best kind of miracle, which we would share only with her. We apologize if anyone dies from our activities. The love is for our Jason, the sky, Father, our house. We have learned from our mother that for each of us there is a double, and this double is comprised of wind. We beg her to take notice of our brother above. Under this house we have built, there will appear the man who decides each storm’s eye. Bless us, please, but we choose to remain aboveground with this father. Its hand will grasp the rock, if we are lucky, and throw it in among the trees. Dear Mother, do not blame us if we have gone to this rock to dig for ourselves — whatever it is that we know we are without but cannot name. It was you who initiated this procedure of burials. Accept our apologies if we continue to dig in these and other areas. No matter what, our shovels will stab shy of your location.

The man activity looks like many other tasks. An overhead view shows your man in your choice of terrain, accompanied by certain fellow living creatures such as slow-moving children and older, less relevant persons which can do no harm. An occasional bald eagle soars overhead and fellow men sniff at you in greeting. Your man can run, walk, sleep, drink, eat, and, of course, weep and die.

But it is actually living as a man that makes Man addictive — and life as a man is hard. Man lets you move through different scenarios, from the simple — killing the child or finding water — to the difficult — mating with a man of the opposite sex.

You can operate in a campaign mode where your man lives in a pack and tries to become the “thompson,” or supreme leader, while grappling with everyday survival. Bad weather, nonspecific terrain, and scarce food all are quick conquers compared to the threat of the animal; eluding the dog that might stalk you is nearly futile, and not worth failing at, even for points of valor. The quickest scenarios, such as digging the hole and achieving confinement, ultimately prove to be the fastest forms of exit, considering the complete coverage of the animal, and its central, driving need to have your man, wherever you may have hidden him.