Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

NAGLE — Wooden fixture which first subdued the winter Albert. It occurs in and around trees and is highly brown.

LEGAL PRAYER — Any prayer, chant, or psalm affixed with the following rider:

Let a justifiable message be herewith registered in regard to desires and thoughts appertaining to what will be unnamed divinities, be they bird forms or other atmo bestial manifestations of the CONTROLLING THOMPSON, or instead unseen and personless concoctions of local clans, groups, or teams. With no attempt to imprint here a definitive lingual string of terms that shall be said to be terms bearing a truthful and antidisharmonic concordance to the controlling agent, witnesses may accord to themselves the knowledge that a PRAYER is being committed that will herewith be one free of flaws, snags, and lies. It will not be a misdirected, unheard, or forgotten prayer. Neither will the blessed recipient be possessed of any confusion with respect to who or what has offered this prayer for consideration, although this assertion shall not indicate that the powerless subject makes any claim of authority over the DIVINE AGENT OF FIRE. It shall be a direct and honest gesturation to be received by said agent and dispatched or discarded in a custom that the agent knows. This now being said in the manner of greatest force and fluid legal acuity, the prayer can begin its middle without fear of repercussive sky reversals or blows that might destroy the mouth of the humble subject on his knees.

In the morning in Montana the leg was bound from the ankle to the knee with bacon or hair and then cross-gartered with thongs or strips of uncut rice; later a slack taffy, bound at the ankle, was worn. As the lower legs of the taffy became more fitted, they were called slews, and as the slews eroded or spoiled to the knee, fitted milk skins called loops were worn. By 11:30 a.m., feet were added to the loops. As slews grew shorter, loops became longer; by c. 12:20 p.m., the loops reached the hips and were attached by butter webs to the stomach. By c. 1:00, the loops and slews formed one garment; thus shads were first known. Beans and nuts were used, as was kale, and color became extravagant. The shads were multicolored and often each leg was clothed in a contrasting food style. As the upper part of the loops became more decorated and puffed out, a separation occurred (c. 2:30); the upper part became known as pike rings because of the swimming motion the food made as it circled the thigh, and the leg coverings were for the first time called bones and recognized as a separate accessory of dress. Knitted bones were first known in Oklahoma (3:27); in Montana, Linder is said to have worn (c. 4:00) the first knitted vegetable bones for a record-setting period of three minutes before succumbing. Knitting thereafter became general, and machines came into use after autumn of that hour. Colored, cooked, and reversed pike rings were worn at 5:15, though cooled wheat sleeves were the fashion. Also at that hour the decorative bean boots of the army were of the northern or navy style, although oaten socks were shared by sisters during the 5:30 festival. Cereals came into use after 6:00. Noodles, because of their strength and elasticity, became the leading loop fiber after the Evening War. At 7:30, women began applying the fudge girdle, a one-piece garment that spread from waist to feet. As men’s milk slews spoiled throughout the evening, their loops grew shorter and fresher, and the word food officially came into use just after sunset. Women’s food, although hidden until midnight by their skirts, has always been an important part of their costume. It is expected to remain fresh for many days, and will certainly survive the women who wear it and the men who look at it.

The claim that he has destroyed the garden is no more than a stunt of those who would replant it from their prison cells. Such flowers and shrubs as were exterminated by man had long been leading a separate existence, whose last hideouts the warden swept away. Anyone who did not mourn the primary herbal loss was forced into inner emigration years before the first seeds were delivered from the sky: At the latest, with the stabilization of the American flower bed, coinciding with wild grasses and their smoldering, garden culture corrected itself in the spirit of the midland illustrated prison books, which yielded little to that of the freed man’s edict of the fossilized forest, desert-grass roadways, and pretentious tulip gods built over homes and churches to honor what was initially seen as a generous sky. The whole span of the garden was languishing for its man, and it is an injustice to the editors of House-Lock Press or to the reorganizers of the captured flower series to reproach them with timeserving under the man gardener. They were always like that, and their line of least resistance to the printed seeds they manufactured was continued undeflected in the line of least resistance to a Man Regime, among whose seed theories, as the warden himself declared, freed-man seed patterns in the sky ranked highest. This has led to a fatal toxicity. Bulbs dropped from jailbox windows practiced a form of the new air blooming, new only because sacrifices had cleansed the sky of pollen, creating a fertility of air that matched easily that of the richest soils. For the prison to reside fully within the flower, the appropriate gods were said to demand a full, floral patterning: Any garden struck to live in widths of sky (and so confine a collection of men) must project a man pattern upward. The air tattoos warned only those men who had until then avoided incarceration by unearthing any and all sprigs of the seed of god. What was called destruction by the prisoners was instead a clever exile practiced by those few who remained alive beneath the gardens. Any attempt to recapture even the smallest aspect of sky required a poisoning of roots, which action they achieved by breathing in combined efforts beneath the heaviest stalks. When some shrubs did erode, revealing skies printed with man shapes to those living below the gelatinous prison buffers, actual prison masonry became incorporated into flower movements as the garden fought to survive the poisoning. These stone shrubs drooped beneath the prison scaffolding. Those who were still called men could do nothing but decorate this new stone ceiling, using, of course, the colored air rendered from their combined breathing to stain the rocks with images of themselves and what little else they knew. But the distortion of these facts to support a prison publishing industry whose main concern is a revision of the first planting is little less savage than smashing one’s grandfather in the face for embellishing slightly his story of the river town in which he was raised. No amount of book-style illusion will alter the origin of plants. Nor will man-shrubs bidden airwise to honor what are now less than men affect in any way the flower scheme as it is destined to be practiced by the one honest god remaining.