The Age of Wire and String

TERMS

LEG INITIATIONS — Act or technique of preparing the legs for sleep. They may be rubbed, shaved, or dressed in pooter.

ALBERT — Nightly killer of light, applied to systems or bodies which alter postures under various stages of darkness. Flattened versions exist only in the water or grass. They may not rise until light is poured upon them.

PROFESSIONAL SLEEPERS — Members whose sleep acts perform specific, useful functions in a society. Clustered sleepers ward off birds; single, submerged sleepers seal culprits in houses; dozers heaped in cloth enhance the grasses of a given area, restore belief in houses.

SADNESS — The first powder to be abided upon waking. It may reside in tools or garments and can be eradicated with more of itself, in which case the face results as a placid system coursing with water, heaving.

SLEEP HOLES — Areas or predesigned localities in which dormant figures and members conduct elaborate sleep performances. Points are scored for swimming, riding, and killing. Some members utilize these sites to perfect their sleep speech, in order to profess the dozer’s knowledge. Others exercise or copulate or rapidly eat cloth and grain. The father slept in one for four hours while smashing his own house, which contained its own sleepers, who performed nothing.

BIRD S EVEN — 1. Period in which members Linda through early Rachel engaged in storm pantomimes. 2. Year of the body. 3. Last moment in which the skin of a member gains oracular capacity of wind trapping. 4. The first day of life. 5. The end times.

SHIRT OF NOISE — Garment, fabric, or residue that absorbs and holds sound, storing messages for journeys. Its loudness cannot be soothed. It can destroy the member which inhabits it.

NITZEL’S GAMBLE — The act or technique of filling the lungs with water. The chance was first taken by the Nitzel in Green River.

SUN STICK — Item of the body which first turns toward sun when a member dies, sleeps, collapses. It is the pure compass toward tracts that are heated and safe, also called true places.

WIND BOWL — Pocket of curved, unsteady space formed between speaking persons. They may discuss the house, its grass, some foods, the father inside. The wind bowl will tilt and push across their faces, that they might appear leaning back, arching away from each other, grasping at the ground behind them as if sleeping.

SALT — An item that comprises the inner and outer core of most to all animals. An animal may be licked free of this salt, or an animal may be hosed clean or scraped. Only when it coughs up salt or otherwise produces salt matter from within can the animal be expected in a short time to collapse outward and exit the place of confinement.

SLEEPING GROUP — Team of members which performs mutual, radical sleep acts in various sites of varying difficulty. They are satisfied not with primary sleeping but with watching the sleeping of others. These are members which can copulate, speak, or eat only when surrounded by fields of tossing sleepers that are weeping, are moaning, are struggling to breathe.

JENNIFER — The inability to see. Partial blindness in regard to hands. To Jennifer is to feign blindness. The diseases resulting from these acts are called jennies.