Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

BLAIN — Cloth chewed to frequent raggedness by a boy. Lethal to birds. When blanketed over the house, the sky will be swept of objects.

CARL — Name applied to food built from textiles, sticks, and rags. Implements used to aid ingestion are termed, respectively, the lens , the dial , the knob .

CHOKE POWDER — Rocks and granules derived from the neck or shoulder of a member. If the mouth harness is tightened, the powder is issued in the saliva and comes to rim the teeth or coat the thong. For each member of a society, there exists a vial of powder. It is the pure form of this member, to be saved first. When the member is collapsing or rescinding, the powder may be retrieved by gripping the member’s neck tightly and driving the knee into its throat.

EATING — 1. Activity of archaic devotion in which objects such as the father’s garment are placed inside the body and worshiped. 2. The act or technique of rescuing items from under the light and placing them within. Once inside the cavity, the item is permanently inscribed with the resolutions of that body and can therefore be considered an ally of the person. 3. Dying. Since the first act of the body is to produce its own demise, eating can be considered an acceleration of this process. Morsels and small golden breads enter the mouth from without to enhance the motions and stillnesses, boost the tones and silences. These are items which bring forth instructions from the larger society to the place of darkness and unknowing: the sticky core, the area within, the bone. 4. Chewing or imbibing elements that have escaped from the member or person into various arenas and fields.

CLOTH-EATERS, THE — First group actively to chew, consume, and otherwise quaff extensive bolts and stacks of cloth.

TREE BREAD — The victuals in concert with tree systems.

FOOD SPRING — 1. The third season of food. It occurs after hardening, delivering a vital sheen to the product, which becomes juicy, colorful, light. It lasts for a period of moments, after which the edible begins to brown, sink, fade. 2. Vernal orifice through which foods emerge or cease to be seen.

FOOD MAP OF YVONNE, THE — I. Parchment upon which can be found the location of certain specialized feminine edibles. 2. Locations within a settlement in which food has been ingested, produced, or discussed. 3. Scroll of third Yvonne, comprised of fastened grain and skins. This document sustained the Yvonne when it was restricted from the home grave.

FOOD POSSE — Group which eradicates food products through burial and propulsion. They cast, sling, heave, toss, and throw food into various difficult localities. Food that has been honored or worshiped is smothered with sand. Edibles shined, polished, or golded are rusted with deadwater. Snacks from the home are placed in the buttocks and crushed.

FUDGE GIRDLE, THE — Crumpets of cooked or flattened chocolage, bound or fastened by wire. This garment is spreadable. It is tailored strictly with heat and string and is cooked onto the body of the ancient member. At fights and thrashings, the fiend is consumed through this girdle.

MOUTH HARNESS, THE — 1. Device for trapping and containing the head. Mouths are often stuffed with items —the only objects legally defined as suspicious or worthy of silent paranoid regard. A claim is therefore made that we eat suspicion and become filled with it. The harness is designed to block all ingestion. Gervin states: “His mouth will be covered with a wire web. He shall never eat. Nor may he ever take what is outside and bring it inside. His stomach will forever devise upon what is within.” 2. A system applied to the head to prevent destruction or collapse while reading or absorbing code.

GERVIN — Deviser of first fire forms and larger heat emblems. The

Gervin exists in person form in all texts but is strictly a symbol or shape in the actual society. To gervin is to accommodate heated objects against one’s body. One may also gervin by mouthing heated items of one’s own body: the hand, the eye, the cupped rim of the lips.

KENNETH SISTERS, THE — Devisers of first food spring — blond-haired, slim-hipped, large, working hands. They dug the base for what would later become Illinois. They lived to be, respectively, fifty-seven, seventy-one, nine, forty-five, eighteen, and forty.

STINKPOINT — Moment of odor slightly frontward from the producing body. Since all odors issue first into a fraction of the forward air, allowing them to fall into a member advancing in time, any member achieving or arriving in a stinkpoint is also said to be a creator and coconspirator of any smells and smell systems in the society.

SHADOW CELLS — The visible, viscous grain deposited upon any area recently blanketed in shadow. The cells may be packed into dough, then spread onto the legs or hips. They may darken or obscure the head for an infinite period.

SPEED-FASTING EXPERIMENTS — Activity or practice of accelerated food abstention. It was first conducted in Buffalo. The record death by fasting occurred in two days, through motor-starving and exhaustion, verbal.

STORM LUNG — Object which can be swallowed to forestall the effects of weather upon a body.

TOPOGRAPHICAL LEGEND AND LOCATION OF FOOD NOOKS — System of overmaps depicting buried food quadrants, sauce grooves, and faults or fissures in which grains and beans are caught. The cloth form of the map can be applied to the bodies of animals, to clarify areas in which hollows might have amassed.

ODOR SPIRALING — Tossing, turning, and flinging of the head so as to render radical, unknown odors in a locality.

There exists in some precincts the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself in the presence of the mister, the female, the children, whomever. The man powers in, arranges a prison of wire or rope onto the members of the shelter, and settles onto a comfortable area — the rug, a layered blanket, the soft membrane of the floor — to attain a posture of attention to his own body that will render its demise. They are forced to watch, the family. He lights a fire, this man. Or he arranges the appliances to emit the sensations of music, acquits himself of the gentleman’s dance in the center of the room, queries the animal likeness carved into his garment. In other versions he strips to his skin and manifests a final saying to his audience. Make no mistake, they are bound such with the wire or rope that they are forced to acquire the status of audience to this act, and then further to the self-created corpse, which singularly occupies their attention until rescue arrives. The condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually. The intruder might apply a final wound onto himself with pistol or kerm. This knife is curved, fluent in the obstacles of bone and cloth.

What is interesting, as always, is the aftermath. The body, as such, lies often coiled on the floor. Whosoever sits bound at the perimeter must witness its stillness. The television, when activated, accompanies the temperature of the room with a purling forth of warm air, casting the captives under the bluish gild of the broadcast runnel. Thereafter, through unspecified elaborate means, a single figure from the bound hostages — and plural it is, always — manages to delimit himself from his lashed state and escape the site. It is this figure — the escapee who abandons his bound gang for some place of lesser tension — who not only is accused of a murder but confesses to one, thus absorbing the suicide as his own act, despite the weirdly meek pleas of his family, whose claims for his innocence sound hollow, fictional.