The Age of Wire and String

THE 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 forth 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.

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