The Age of Wire and String

TERMS

BEN MARCUS, THE — 1. False map, scroll, caul, or parchment. It is comprised of the first skin. In ancient times, it hung from a pole, where wind and birds inscribed its surface. Every year, it was lowered and the engravings and dents that the wind had introduced were studied. It can be large, although often it is tiny and illegible. Members wring it dry. It is a fitful chart in darkness. When properly decoded (an act in which the rule of opposite perception applies), it indicates only that we should destroy it and look elsewhere for instruction. In four, a chaplain donned the Ben Marcus and drowned in Green River. 2. The garment that is too heavy to allow movement. These cloths are designed as prison structures for bodies, dogs, persons, members. 3. Figure from which the antiperson is derived; or, simply, the antiperson. It must refer uselessly and endlessly and always to weather, food, birds, or cloth, and is produced of an even ratio of skin and hair, with declension of the latter in proportion to expansion of the former. It has been represented in other figures such as Malcolm and Laramie, although aspects of it have been co-opted for uses in John. Other members claim to inhabit its form and are refused entry to the house. The victuals of the antiperson derive from itself, explaining why it is often represented as a partial or incomplete body or system — meaning it is often missing things: a knee, the mouth, shoes, a heart.

CANINE FIELDS — 1. Parks in which the apprentice is trained down to animal status. 2. Area or site, which subdues, through loaded, pre-chemical grass shapes, all dog forms. 3. Place in which men, girls, or ladies weep for lost or hidden things.

REPRESENTATIONAL LIFE — Life that strives as well as it can to be quick, to present the body (if at all) as infrequently as it should appear to any careful and vigilant observer — in the crowd, in the home, as well as within the open areas of land, among the animals. This life minimizes use of such devices of living as emotional coloration, connotative gesture, words, and imagination, including waking up, opening the eyes, and chewing, if food is found within gnashing range of the mouth.

LEGAL BEAST LANGUAGE — The four, six, or nine words that technically and legally comprise the full extent of possible lexia that might erupt or otherwise burst from the head structure of Alberts.

CIRCUM-FEETING — Act of binding, tying, or stuffing of the feet. It is a ritual of incapacitation applied to boys. When the feet are thusly hobbled, the boys are forced to race to certain sites of desirous inhabitation: the mountain, the home, the mother’s arms.

JERKINS — First farmer.

SKY INTERCEPTION, OR SINTER — The obstruction caused by birds when light is projected from sun sources affixed to hills and rivers, causing members to see patterns, films, or “clouds.” Sinter is an acronym for sky interception and noise transfer of emergent rag forms.

TUNGSTEN — 1. Hardened form of the anger and rage metals. 2. Fossilized behavior, frozen into mountainsides, depicting the seven scenes of escape and the four motifs of breathing while dead.

DROWNING WIRES — Metallic elements within rivers and streams that deploy magnetic allure to swimmers.

RHETORIC — The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms — the dash gives the reader a clear signal that they are coming.