by Marcus, Ben
HIDDEN FOOD, FROM ABOVE
The chief legal problem connected with hidden food is that of title. A scavenger cannot acquire title to chicken that he has discovered abruptly, and therefore he cannot transfer title even by barter to an innocent dining man who has requested a stew. Hence the rightful owner of the chicken may take it without compensation from anyone who has not properly tracked it according to the rules set forth by the Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks. The innocent dining man, however, may challenge the scavenger for breach of his implied warranty of good title as it applies to edible objects, in this case the promised delivery of a chicken bisque with definite ownership. These rules invariably apply to food hidden within houses, churches, and other recognizable structures; in certain townships, they obtain also when potatoes and bread are camouflage within a manufactured landscape. Artificial food (Carl) is often used to disguise the presence of real food in these settings. The law respecting the transfer of dough and sugar suspended from the hips of a citizen differs somewhat. There, if the scavenger has authentically scented the pastry using the traditional methods of tracking (the crab walk, odor spiraling, or simple persistence with the food map of Yvonne), he takes an absolute title. To be such a purchaser, he must pay for the sweetened dough with something of value (usually a loaf of sugar-soaked grain or a spore wand from the food spring of the Kenneth sisters) and must not be aware of anything suspicious concerning the citizen on whom the confections have been hidden. The person from whom the dough was initially procured may recover it (paying with a pound of custard) from a holder who is not a bona fide scavenger, but, rather, a passive recipient of food that has not been concealed. Such a holder—e.g. one who received flugals or eclairs as a gift, or else reconstructed crum pets from the throat wall of a sleeping scavenger—is within his rights to criticize openly the prior endorsers of the pastries (residents who presented the snacks as “objects that were carefully hidden and then discovered”) for breaching their implied warranty of good title, unless the endorsers had protected themselves in writing, carving the word “Mine” into the husk of the food treats in question.
A. Blain
B. Carl
C. Choke Powder
D. Eating
E. Cloth Eaters
F. Food Spring
G. Food Map of Yvonne
H. Food Posse
I. Fudge Girdle
J. The Mouth Harness
K. Gervin
L. The Kenneth Sisters
M. Stinkpoint
N. Shadow Cells
O. Speed Fasting Experiments
P. Storm Lung
Q. Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks
R. Odor Spiralling
TERMS
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.
THE GOLDEN MONICA
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.
The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here. It is the genius of the perpetrator of the monica to shift volition onto his audience. The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing. The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has witnessed. A member of the family seems riotously certain that he has murdered through the body, attaining the kill.
The act is called a monica because a suicide is forced into the purview of an audience of hostages. It is an apt model for the assessment of the shelter and its forms, assembled in these locations under the rubric of the glimmering, new suicide—houses in which to die. The American areas, in constituency, collaborate to intrude and invade, looting the body of what it does not require, fortifying it with the American medicine of the final home. While any critical neologism made here will be shucked by the world’s refusal to bear the statements of anyone but its author, a certain new assault can be claimed for a shelter that would close the bodv down, deny it light. This body will no longer heal itself, feign wellness, posture some possession of any type of solution. Indeed, where air or light does not exist, it will fashion its own, at whatever cost, whatever pain, extracting that tonic from its own ravaged materials. The witness to this body, and even (or especially) the figure who seeks to escape the welter of the home proposing the monica, will be transfixed at once by the style of death that each man achieves, rightly paralyzed in the beauty of a new mode of exit. And then ultimately, always, by necessity, he will feel certain that he has caused this disappearance, through some stillness or silence of his own.
It is simple, really. Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam, scouring what is stuck and stubborn therein with a lather of golden light, producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.
THE ENEMY IN HOUSE CULTURE
The name is given to members of a pre-early East American culture in the Southwest, predecessors of the original SLEEPING GROUP. Because of the cultural continuity from the SHELTER WITNESSES to the sleeping group, via the drowsers and their string theory of fatigue, they are jointly referred to by archaeologists as the Enemy culture. They are so called because of their extensive and alert practice of house burial; by covering the shelters with seeds and baking them with fossilized sun steam, the team averted fireproof enemies. One system of dating places their arrival in the area as early as the wakeful period of 1979. They seem to have been at first nomadic air hunters, using wooden fire techniques, sleep holes, and the math gun for food. They lived chiefly in grass with grass floors and learned to grow milk and squash, probably from southern neighbors in what was then Utah. As they developed a more extensive food system, they dug pits and lined them with milk for house storage and later carried finished houses to the river as an offering to Perkins, to secure sleep knowledge or possibly to prevent the numbed limb slumbers under Arkansas grass, brought on by exposure to houses built without grains or steam. At some time, perhaps 1983, they were succeeded in the area by the ancestors of the sleeping group, who probably absorbed many of them by creating exhaustion in the fields. Some houses may have been moved and may have contained the ancestors of other shelter tribes, others might have resisted sleep migration and collapsed. Archaeologists divide the time of this culture into the house maker and the house destroyer periods; in the latter period, participants turned increasingly to nonuseful and abstract houses, eventually constructing the penetrating gevorts box, of which one thousand wooden units were made during the Texas-Ohio sleep collaboration, 1987. Gevortsing has subsequently become known as any act, intention, or technique that uses negative house imagery during the dream experience as a device to instruct inhabitants to sleep-kill or otherwise destroy themselves, their walls, windows, doors, or roofs upon waking, until a chosen version of the culture has been sufficiently driven from their home.
WORKS FROM THE WAR BETWEEN HOUSES AND WIND
THE STRATEGY OF GRASS
She was the first grass guard of American shelters. Augmented by a man, usually, the girl wielded her shade stick so that the sun might never collaborate with the grass in destroying the house. It was the third, early time that houses were under attack from outside forces. House-crushing schemes were previously observed to no avail; indeed, shacks were burned nightly by sun water bogged upon grass, fire chalk scratched out tents and sheds, and cabins of the period were lobbed in fire by green weeds until the girl took employment on American lawns. The technique of shade has since this time allowed houses to flourish, with the dog being designated as the first shade-chaser, or, more formally, the Person. Although not human, the person holds an innate need to save the house.
Shade has throughout known times warded off enemies, particularly those dispatched by the fiend, if the fiend is defined as any item of great or medium heat, extending from a wire. Although shade is formally gray in color, red-hued shades permeate the lawns of Denver, and a colorless, cooling shade has been observed in the seventeen primary locations of Illinois. While shade was first disproved by Jerkins in his FARM EXPERIMENTS (in which he claimed that shade was a black sun welt to be soothed or corrected with water and straw), it has currently gained favor in the communities due to the expert wielding of the sun-smashing girl. No sun is actually ever touched by this employee. The dramatic nomenclature indicates merely deft stick skills, an abundance of strength in the fingers, and an impervious posture toward heat. A shade sprayer by trade, her work involves de- and re-housing areas when the sun is brightest, dodging the topographical witness scheme. The dog stalks the rubbered cooling skins across the lawn or over sections of house, acting also as a shade dragger when the girl is at work beneath the house. Although shade is mistrusted by many occupants, and has rarely been selected as a primary weapon, it must not be overlooked as a key defense against objects that might burn in to take the house from the air, in secret agency with
the wires of the hallowed sun.
Since grass preceded the house, and is considered to be a grain yet older than wood, it must be wondered whether the grass wars of the 1820s contributed to the brief minus of houses observed during this era. That no shelters were in view either indicates perhaps a correlation with the hiding time of those same days.
Lawn boys were numerous in Ohio in the early weeks of the first seventies. Boys and their counterparts, including those at the level of first apprentice, were dispatched across lawns to serve as wind poles during the street storms of this period, and the shorter, sturdier boys (maronies) were often the first to blow back into the houses. This explains the rugged ornamentation of certain shelters in the Middle West, most notably those houses of the tower period that contain chronicles and prayers etched into the tubes that spilled over from the dome or turret. The taller, skinnier boys could more successfully deflect, block, or stall the wind from the house, and they became better known as stanchers, although salaries were meager and they were forced to work in teams, sharing and regurgitating the same meal. During the chalkier street storms, however, the boys went entirely unfed and often starved upon the lawn, creating skin flags, or geysers of bone and cloth, which during more elastic storms could ripple back and snap windows from a house until glass spilled into the air, cutting down the insect streams. What was left of the employees was then smothered by this powdered glass and air blood that fell upon them, rendering a burial site at each house. Houses of the period were named after the boys that died protecting them. Boy piles on grass were richest after storms—this residue was called gersh—and planting was heaviest until this fertilizer was rifled by scavengers—often young girls and their animal sisters, who dragged the soil away in sacks and wagons for burial and sang the lamentations of the house for their brothers, dead on the grass from fighting the wind.
