Free Notable American Women by Ben Marcus

applause. People should go home wearing the decay that the book enabled.
    The book should be closed so hard that a wind blows from it, gusting however feebly into whatever little world there is left. The day will be late, the sun a small accident in the sky, quickly apologizing from sight. This book wind will blow on whatever people happen to get in front of it, whoever’s not too terribly tired to walk a short routine in the park and show off their body to the Bird. A shy breeze will rub their faces, twisting their hair into punctuation above their heads, the way wind from another town feels different and wrong and reminds you how far from home you are; some touch or gust or small warning of themselves, all from the wind released by this book, and briefly something will matter, though it will never be articulated or shared, but the wind will continue to digress, deflecting from bodies and objects, losing itself in the things of this world that pass for bodies and people, and the last little breeze from this book will finally fade out somewhere near the coast, where the land is dying every day into the water, just shy of the ocean, ending in a brief ripple in the sand.
    If this wind were colored red, by a process that probably will get invented sometime soon, a cartoon weather to further exaggerate what goes on around us, lest we missed the point, in case some tiny fraction of life had miraculously gone unexplained, then the wind from this book would look like blood introduced into water, curdled and red and slow, a thick and terribly detourable fluid that can easily be diluted and absorbed invisibly into the larger world, and dissipatingly killed, by a simple wave of the hand.
    There would be no funeral, unless a funeral can be characterized as a period of mass, united indifference; only a moment when everyone everywhere is all at once awake, in cities and in the country and even our enemies at sea, coincidentally thinking simultaneously of nothing at all in common, standing or sitting or reclining or diving, in an apparent world that is suddenly, and only for a moment, and for the very first time, completely free of air.
    The tombstone for this book will read THE END.

Better Reading Through Food
    MY LIFE HAS BEEN LIVED under the strategic nourishment of the Thompson Food Scheme, a female eating system (FEAST) devised by an early Jane Dark deity construct named Thompson, who later became an actual person, though not a good one. The food regimen I have followed was further modified by my “parents” to suit their early experiments with silence and voluntary paralysis, not to mention the person-shaping projects they conducted on myself and my sister, who died for other reasons.
    The diet Thompson and his food team developed was meant at first to favor a woman’s mind and blood, to dispose her to the vowel world hidden within American dialects and weather, and lastly to enable strains of behavior considered to be distinctly female—actions, thoughts, and standing poses only girls and women can produce. It is also a diet meant to feed and promote silence, limit motion, and restrict hearing and speech to an all-vowel repertoire. In my own case, a symptom of selective deafness (to my father’s voice, then later deafness to my own voice) emerged in my youth that I cannot help but relate to the food I eat.
    Indeed, the word “eat” does not adequately cover what can be done with foodstuffs. For instance, I consume nuts in great quantities, as well as every kind of nut butter and the water extracted from pressed vegetable seeds, though the seeds themselves would poison me. I drink milk and sometimes take a syringe of pure, animal milk into a delicate vein in my ankle. In the morning, I chew the skins of fruit; the pulp is stored under my tongue throughout the day, then discarded into my chewed-food wallet, and later archived. I apply a fiber poultice against my legs, using a roughage sponge, and