by Marcus, Ben
LANDING ON FLOATING ISLAND
OF THE GODS
Landing on floating island of the gods without invitation, form of deafness exemplified by reckless flying. The flier is within the wind, is an aspect of human weather. When one of the senses is stalled, a form of deviant weather occurs where the wind’s bits (fliers) do not adhere to the arc of their origin. This causes all kinds of crazy landings. The particular deafness spoken of here effects breaches formerly unheard of; the flier will glide unknowingly past the warnings of others, he will focus only on a lush strip of green-and-gold earth seemingly floating in the middle skin of the atmosphere. The gods are there. With closed eyes, they are frying tiny birds over a fire. Then from the sky a man hurtles downward, the sound of the gods washing past him like colored wind, his fingers twisting in elaborate shapes of speech. The gods turn their heads into the smell of the roasting food, their dream erased by a dark rupture in the sky.
ETHICS OF LISTENING WHEN
VISITING AREAS THAT CONTAIN HIM
The confession of father is instituted by a low, glass-covered frame structure for starting speeches. It differs from a LISTENING FRAME only in that the soil is heated by day—either artificially by underground electric wiring or graveyard pipes, or naturally with women’s manure. The manure is first folded daily until the initial period of strong fermentation is over; it is then mixed with a garment of the father, placed in the bottom of the receptacle, and covered with an appropriate amount of soil. Heat is produced by the union of the waste and the rag. Visitations occur by one family member. Note: If the child goes to the garden to absolve him, he should bring a burlap bag. This reduces the necessity of covering the grave with blankets or other insulation at night, when the one underground is shivering too much to speak.
TERMS
CLOUD SHIMS — Trees, brush, shrubs, or wooden planks that form the walls of the heaven container. These items are painted with blues and grays and the golds of the earliest sky. They are tiny, although some are large. They exist mainly to accommodate the engravings of the container, allowing a writable surface to exist aloft. The engravings command the member down or up, in or out, or back, back and away from here.
CROONAL — A song containing information about a lost, loved, or dead member. These are leg songs or simple wind arrangements. They are performed by the Morgan girl, who has run or walked a great distance and cannot breathe. She fashions noises between her hands by clapping and pumping her homemade air.
TREASURE OF POSSIBLE ENUNCIATIONS — Catalog of first, last, and intermediate lexia. It includes all possible words and their unutterable opposites. Other than Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire, no other such comprehensive system exists.
GOD CHARGE — Amount or degree of Thompson occurring in a person or shelter.
HEEN VIEWING — I. The act, technique, or practice of viewing, with intent to destroy, any object or residue within or upon the house. Punishments of such acts include demotion to lower house, in which the culprit is subjected to endless attentions, proddings, mountings, and group viewings by an unbroken stream of voluntary wardens. 2. To covet the life of another. 3. To look at a body and wish to destroy it. The heen in this case occurs or emanates from the hips, and the term applies in all cases less the one in which a member is looking upon, and wishing to terminate, his own body, which act goes unpunished.
HEAVEN — Area of final containment. It is modeled after the first house. It may be hooked and slid and shifted. The bottom may be sawed through. Members inside stare outward and sometimes reach.
FIEND, THE — 1. Heated thing. 2. Item or member which burrows under the soil. 3. Item which is eaten postday. 4. Any aspect of Thompson which Thompson cannot control.
GOD-BURNING SYSTEM — Method of Thompsonian self-immolation. For each Thompson, there exist flammable outcrops or limbs which rub onto the larger body of Thompson (Perkins), rendering morning fires and emberage that lights the sky and advances the time of a given society or culture.
GODPIECE — Cup, bowl, or hoop, which, when swished through air, passed under water, or buried for an indefinite time in sand will attract fragments and other unknown grains that comprise the monetary units of a given culture. The godpiece is known further as a wallet, satchel, or bag that assigns value to the objects inside it.
HEAVEN CONSTRUCTION THEORY — The notion brought to bear on the construction of the final shelter. All work in this area is done under the influence of the first powder, so the hands may shake, the eyes be glazed, the body be soft and movable.
LIVING, THE — Those members, persons, and items that still appear to engage their hands into what is hot, what is rubbery, what cannot be seen or lifted.
MATH GUN, THE — I. Mouth of the father, equipped with a red freckle, glistening. It is shined by foods, dulled with water, left alone by all else. 2. His pencil. It shortens with use and must be shaved, trimmed, or sharpened by the person, who follows behind with a knife.
PERKINS — I. Term given to the body of Thompson, in order that His physical form never desecrate His own name. 2. The god of territory.
RAG, THE, OR PRAYER RAG — Device of stripped or pounded cloth, held to the mouth during prayer.
STRING THEORY OF FATIGUE — System or technique of diagnosing the level of exhaustion in a member by covering it with medical ropes.
RARE WATERS, THE — Series of liquids containing samples of the first water. It is the only water not yet killed. It rims the eyes, falls from them during certain times, and collects at the feet, averting the grasp of hands, which are dry, and need it.
SUN STALLS — Abrupt disruptions in the emissions of the sun. They occur in the blazing quarter strips which flap. There begins a clicking or slow sucking sound. Members standing below arch or bend. They raise a hand to the ear or eye, form a cup or shield.
WEATHER BIRTHING — 1. The act or technique of selecting and reciting certain words within given, fixed sky situations with the intent of generating, enhancing, or subtracting weather from a given area in the society. 2. Burning the skin of a member to alter the sky shapes of a locality. 3. Placing powders or other grains in the mouth while speaking to alter the temperature of a local site. 4. Whispering while holding birds in the mouth.
BEEF SEEDS — Items, scraps, or buttons that bear forth fibrous tissue striata after being buried under milk-loaded cloth.
WESTERN WORSHIP BOXES — The smallest structures, designed to fit precisely one body. They are rough-walled and dank, wooden and finely trimmed—the only areas of devotion. When more than one body enters to worship as a team, the box gevorts.
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.
TH
E FOOD COSTUMES
OF MONTANA
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.
FIRST GREEN
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.
BRIAN, TREATED TO
A DELICATE MEAL
BRIAN, treated to a delicate meal, a method of keeping travelers at bay. Most instances of travel will offer several opportunities for sleeping within a short time; the rising traveler will encounter the sleeping or eating traveler during this period. Denying Brian food can be used to encourage the travelers to sleep, or to remain lying down until Brian is fed.
The energy of travelers is supplied vertically, through the feet; therefore, the sleeping traveler is temporarily cut off from this supply, and Brian remains hungry. Locomotion installs sleepiness, and a field, called a somnalian area, is generated in the doorway of the dining car.
The dichotomy between the sleeping and nonsleeping traveler extends beyond states of alertness. When the traveler is vertical, he will be resisted by the somnalian field in front of the dining car because of his high content of energy, and a positive charge will be issued within the dining room, enabling a delicate meal to be served to Brian.
This field is, in part, generated by the horizontal (sleeping or nonsleeping) traveler, who, because of his low or nonexistent energy, is the only traveler able to eat. For the sake of keeping Brian fed, some travelers are kept sleeping at all times. A traveler who resists sleeping but remains horizontal for three passes through this cycle will briefly ascend the chain, and pass a rising traveler and go on to eat.
FOOD STORMS OF THE ORIGINAL
BROTHER
The brother is built from food, in the manner of minute particles slowly settling or suspended by slight currents, that exist in varying amounts in all air. There is least food-printing over the ocean and most at low levels over cities; food caused by airplanes is a serious addition to a radical new man-making practiced in versions of Detroit, and explains at least partially the heavy food-fall there. Sources of atmospheric food that can be utilized in the assembling and fall of men are:
1. Winds blowing skin from birds (the skin is a wrap-bag for grains).
2. The various products of combustion at festivals (the brother process in the seasonal Americas requires sufficient picnic heat or flak from any food fires).
3. Mountain breaks releasing flukes of grain (air matches fractures in the mountain and attracts food winds to seal the terrain).
4. Salt spray from the oceans (the strongest glue of food forms is salt in its glacial stage).
5. Bread and other material from plants (as ever, plant breads and their accompanying food posse allow the body to feed upon itself in times of famine).
6. Bits of rain containing beef seeds (rains of the Americas derive from the cattle colonies of the South, often stealing beef from the livestock to thicken the water coverage of storms).
Food sometimes settles quickly on surfaces to precipitate the arrival of persons, but vast assembled dinners are delivered to the layered uppers of the air and suspended there until clouds of wheat and beans breed for
th men parts to bond in the salt rinds of lowest air. The effects of an eruption of tree bread such as that in Larchmont have been observed three years after its occurrence. Anthroscopic food particles (those to which men adhere) are the nuclei of man-making in free air; the nucleus of each head in a fogbank or cloud and of arm-seeds in each rainball and snowshard is one of these invisible particles of first foods. Jason Marcus, the original brother, who in 1990 invented a device for counting the air, first correlated food particles and persons. The food that he discovered comprising his person is also chiefly responsible, through its scattering effect upon light (sun stalls), for one type of darkness that is observed when he takes his falls through and above the land, eating and rebuilding parts of himself in a small cyclone of black seeds and grains.
