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  CIRCLE OF WILLIS

  Bird speech at the circle of willis results in migrant noises or “puddles” that amass near the head of the pedestrian, rallying it toward a form of disruption within the flowing crowd. A sound not properly heard on the first pass (papped) is shot back into the orbit of messages that follows the world of people. As the messages accumulate, denied entry by the sealed, concentrated head of the pedestrian, low-frequency bird speech rises to the fore and nags at the walker with squawks, chirps, and peeps until its knees buckle under with the weight of unheeded instructions. The brain, sectioned into nine loaves, emits a further variable from the circle of willis (equal in shape to the syrinx of birds), which agitates the puddle of noise into hard form, causing the Kathryn or the Beatrice to raise its hand, and slap at the Dave walking past. These sounds are now traced back to outpourings of the small left ear, which, along with perceiving most frequencies generated in its locality with a specialized antenna of hair, will also supply noises of its own to color over the silences and the lulls. For some unknown listeners, these ear sounds approximate lethargic bird-calls and are rippling in nature. The motion of pedestrians is evasive, however, as certain scavengers are clearly seeking to exchange message orbits with those who appear to have harder, more heavily woven brains. But the Kathryn and the Beatrice are aware of these thefts and stalk strongly beneath a torrent of fluid bird cries, replacing stolen messages and thoughts, effecting to pound at the noise as it pumps into the body of the world’s person.

  HORSE, DISTINCT CATEGORY

  Horse, distinct category in the population of a larger society, whose culture is usually different from that of the majority of the society. Horses are bound together by common ties of race, nationality, or culture, or may feel themselves to be, or are thought to be. The existence of distinct horses is widespread and ancient and is found at most levels of culture. Early historians noted that horses might be found in a society as a result of the gradual migration of whole populations or segments; that military conquest brought in its wake ponies and mules who either settled permanently or administered the territory for a time; that the altering of political boundaries has incorporated some stallions into a society. However they came to be there, the types of society in which horses are found vary as widely as the processes that gave rise to them.

  WHERE BIRDS HAVE DESTROYED

  THE SURFACE

  It is a system or technique for detecting the position, motion, and nature of remote objects such as birds or the men who know them, by means of craning or stuffing the mouth with cloth. It was developed independently in most countries. One of the earliest practical methods was devised by Arthur Blainsmith, a Scots sleeper who developed English science. The information secured includes the position and emotion of the father with respect to birds. With some advanced methods, the shape of the father may be surrendered. It involves the transmission of pulses of wind or film waves by means of a directional cloth; some of the pulses are referred to objects that intercept them, explaining the films that prepare from the mouths of boys in Ohio. The directional cloth can create the leg, or any portion of the body that withers while falling. In order for success, however, the mouth must be crammed with it. It must be gnashed, chewed, bitten, or gnawed. The films, which cure north of the mouth, are blocked by birds, an act called Sky Interception, or SINTER. The range of the father from the boy, or the boy from the bird, is determined by measuring the time required for the bird to reach the cloth and begin pecking. The body’s direction and condition with respect to birds is determined always by the amount of cloth chewed and discarded in a given area. This cloth is called blain; it will cause a bird to collapse in the air. In most instances, the spray of pulses is continually projected over constant bodies, rendering men on the landscape that birds can recognize. Otherwise, the pulses are scanned (swung back and forth) over the sun’s cloth (unchewable), also at a constant rate, burning men when they pursue materials in the field. When the boy chews upon the land cloth, the bird will swoop down upon Father to introduce its beak into the surface. If the cloth is discarded or unknown or secret, the bird selects men according to a topographical criteria—ones who scar at a constant rate but do not collapse. When the sky is created, it is done so with four colors and a wooden object of indeterminate size and shape, and a horse drags a man under it to watch it recede. The sky accelerates according to the rate of cloth chewed per day. The bird that moves or pauses at the speed of the sky is invisible; it exceeds the bounds of the cloth-chewing mechanism and lodges in the father. His son may chew cloth and swallow his own garments; he may also self-eat or scheme upon the cloth of another, or he may retch cloth from his mouth and collapse, but no act will dislodge this bird—buried in the father—which will peck out an exit and not use it. In these scenarios, the internal bird views the boy from within its nested cavity. It watches him as it controls the father. It brings the man’s hands up, works the jaw, pours water into the voice. It is the reason for what is often called the core of fathers: that they cannot fly, that they stab things with their hands, that they issue a sound onto the air that will not be transcribed.

  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, fr
ozen 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.

  THE WEATHER KILLER

  They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died. Their houses were boxes, tents, scooped-out dogs, brick towers, and actual houses. Some dug into grass; others camped in shadow; many worked in the house dispersing rice and books and were permitted to sleep on the floor. There was to be no unfolding of blankets or spreading of sheets. Never could a barrier or blind or corner be erected in the house, nor could cloth be clipped or crimped or hung. They sheltered off of one another and slept in heated chains of body. No one could sleep for more than one dream. The dream happened during the day, and the dream was the storm, and the storm was whatever you could name.

  The days were cold and hot and the sun did both things. A man had two names. When a dog punched through a wall, it was devoured. Fur came from anywhere, and even a person’s hair could be stolen. In the tower, a man kept watch. From the grass at the iron base, a boy watched the man, and from the ditch behind the road women watched them both and ate grain from their bags. Eating was secret. Boys brought fruit from the river and were beaten. Men left over from the first storm were the first fed. They drank water and cried.

  The ones that never got born were poured into the river. Throughout the years, they built skin to be inside, and holes were introduced by the wind gun. Houses got small. Some moved underground, but there the wind was thick and fast, and most died in the dirt. When the sun shone, a woman’s hands would burn, and she would be locked from her house. Women sang and built flowers from sawdust, pleading for reentry. They left to live by the river, and were often felled in spring by blind storm veterans, who circled the riverbanks stabbing for game. There was to be no rescuing or slowness; all movement should kill the wind, and, if not, the person would be smothered with cloth and buried. If the river grew calm, a man built a boat. No one ever returned. But a man’s hair might blow back into the grate, and on that day his wife would say a prayer into the rag and drink her water alone.

  The rain was all out. It got thick and it thinned down. But it never stopped. Sometimes snow broke down in sticky sheets, and dogs were caught in it and pecked at by birds. In the flood years, the girls packed the doors with straw and honey. They saw other people broken by fast water. Some schemed to escape in this flow, wrapping themselves in rubber from the rice mill. When the floods wore down every autumn, scavengers from the house found rubber and clothing on the road, but no bodies. No one left. The road was hot during the day, and hotter at night, when the sun burned it from below. One day, the man in the tower fell and was dead before he landed. This happened again. They placed family members under cloth, strangers were allowed to wash away, and animals were positioned on poles.

  The wind grew high-pitched. Many became deaf or their ears blackened. They built houses of shale and cloth inside their own until they could barely move. When the blankets had eroded, a man set to shaving the wood. No one new was placed in the tower. Every year a day was set aside for discussion. There was to be no speech treating the storm, nor could any people be named or represented or spoken of. House-building theories were welcome. When she died, a girl could offer her own bones as a charm against the wind. People sang. Others watched from the last window. Children were encouraged to copulate, but they were sluggish and unresponsive. Birds were loaded with ice. A man taught the children how to have intercourse. They used a stick and some string and a cloth. They broke glass with their feet. They were shielded by a blanket as a scheduler kept them working.

  When the tower froze, a group shattered the base and ran for cover. For months, the iron scraps enforced their roofs, until twisters plowed in from the north. After sleet had frozen their barrels, a group petitioned for suicide. The children were excited. There was no one to keep watch. Objects could smash a man down in the fog. Speeches were given at night, and the large children made fun of the adults, who complained. Storm widows told stories and were punished. A girl prayed at the fence and carved her sign into the ground.

  When the children roamed outside, they formed a circle and moved fast. No one died. They built gloves from thin fossils, and they strengthened their shirts with mud. Chickens were kept in a tunnel beneath the field. A new warm wind was burning the grass. They tied a thin bundle of sticks to their dog and sent him out. A cloth was stretched over the river, and nuts were cooked in the grass. They fixed the fence with wire, and the rain fell off. Some children grew angry at night and beat the veterans. They masturbated into a cup, left the cup by the door.

  There was no season. The sun began to make a noise. There was no rain. Birds began to fly, spooked by the sound. The grass fires cooled. The chickens suffocated and were dragged to the door by the dog, who coughed and tried to hide. A cloud could be fat and have no end, and it might spill fluid onto the hillside. The children made the adults wash their arms. A barrel of seeds was brought up. They baked loaves. The last storm veterans would not uncover themselves. They said they had heard this before. A woman begged to be put to death, wrote her request on a piece of cloth for a child to consider.

  From the window, they saw the sun crowding in, and somewhere a large motor boomed. People slept standing up and held sticks. Clouds were low and shook under the clicks of the sun. A person slammed on the door and was pulled in and beaten. They used hair to pack their roofs and shaved the elders when they slept. A team built huts away from the main house. Children covered their heads and tried to dig. The tunnels were narrow. They placed new babies there. No one could speak above the noise. Girls burned their shirts and covered their breasts with ash. Some dug too far down and drowned in pools of freezing oil. The elders tried to say prayers into rags. They slipped on the ladders and could not return to their rooms. Wrists were broken; ankles were frozen to rock. Salt could be pecked from the walls. The sun’s tumult blasted in through holes they had dug with a wire.

  The new babies had bumps on their hands, and they were strong and big. When they had eaten their grain, they hooked ropes to the surface and made daily trips to the river. The babies’ shelters slowly popped under pressure of the sun, and wood was sent splintering into the warm wind. Horses collapsed. Their ears bled. The society lived underground, and the rubble from their houses drained in on them. Children were born without light. When an elder died, the body was pushed into an unused tunnel and the tunnel was sealed. Boys placed scraps of wire in the widows’ mouths and imitated their crying. Food experts scavenged downward. One day, an underground river burst in on them and seven of them were drowned. In the darkness, boys raped men and shouted. They poked sticks upward in secret, pressed their ears to the surface.

  When the grain was depleted, the youngest ones piled out of holes and ran in the grass. The noise could be seen, and yellow waves pushed down on them. Some collapsed and died. They poked the horses in the belly and stole jewelry from the rubble. The air was cleared of life and birds littered the grass. When the older children emerged from the tunnels, they were tired and their eyes were weak. The youngest ones smothered them and kicked them in the face. A funeral was held for the elders who had not died. Children pulled them on a cart to the river. A young boy held a webbed hoop and swished it through the air to produce a song from the sun’s engine. The girls spread a cloth on the bank of the river and stood on it and spoke. No one had eaten. The elders stood and shivered. Some urinated into their hands for warmth. A boy walked
among them. Brushes could be used to force a man to crouch. His shoulders were blackened and he carried two bags. He stripped the veterans and the widows and the elders, and he saw his own parents and he took their rings and clothing and put everything in a bag. The sun was small and hard. Its noise became a new kind of wind. Trees grew soft and crumbly under it. There were five of them and the boy. He took each naked man into the river and gave him to the current.

  The wind grew strong and reversed. Birds were jerked upward, beyond their ability. The sun became smaller and louder. Holes formed in the earth. Air blasted forth. They walked along the river and camped next to trees. A boy developed his body by carrying rocks and swimming alongside of the group. A close regiment of intercourse was followed. Babies were therefore born. Seeds could be eaten in bulk. A girl rubbed the organ of the leader and tried to take him inside her. They used wire to beat a path north. Clouds were packed with insects and broke open every morning. At night, the leader dragged sand and covered his group with it. He climbed trees to get closer. When they spoke, the sun’s noise grew small. They slept. They pressed their faces into the sand. The air became cold and slow and they could not see. They followed the water. Fish jumped from the freezing river and rested on the shore.