Free Notable American Women by Ben Marcus Page B

children’s literature, I am prone to produce a small thread of human milk from my chest, after which I can be weary and given to fainting. Much of this boy’s milk has been archived throughout my life and labeled in vials according to the genre that charmed it out of me. When I drink from the vials now, I can remember fondly those early stories of my youth: the adventures, mysteries, romances, and quest narratives that were converted by the Susan Group into an all-vowel format and hummed at me while I worked on the Great Antenna.
    As a child of nine, I fasted for four months and still gained three pounds, accumulating mass through gestural practice and the hard women’s mime that was popular at the time in my family. If I fast at the wrong time of day and become caught in a rainstorm, I could easily become paralyzed. I will never fast without wearing a heart magnet (also called The Cookie), which acts effectively as a reset button in such situations. In a winter water fast (WWF), the body absorbs water rather than swallows it, to ventilate the throat and mouth, and scour them free of language residue, or Word Sugar. Much water weight can be gained in the process; spot gaining can specifically be used to enlarge the hands (which can never be too big). When a dieter exits this fast, the French language is the only alphabet of sounds that will not wound the mouth, the flesh of which has softened under the absence of words and will be cut to shreds by the recitation of sharper languages such as German or English, at least until a palate callus is again developed so normal speech may resume.
    As with most diets, however complex they are, water is still the crucial element that supports or undermines the actions of the various edibles. Water is clearly the primary instruction set for the person in the world. Yet Thompson Water™ is the only treated, strategic water used to forcibly alter and promote specific behaviors. (It is technically not a soda: When sweetened, it will burn through the belly and pass from the body as a photographic liquid of the person who swallowed it.) If used more widely in America, Thompson Water™ could easily lead to radical new behaviors—performances of the human enterprise never seen before. Such is the hope, anyway, of people like my mother, who distributed water in the most violent way imaginable (and whom I propose to reveal later in so much detail that no one need ever mention his mother again).
    The notion of Thompson Water™ probably derives from the early American Pantomime Water (Shush), a liquid used to teach children how to behave in the home, marketed in a beverage series called Simple Skills for Children, at sixty cents a bottle. The inner Ohio Pantomime Water of the ’60s, devised by Burke, was administered to me like baby formula and subsequently taught me how to stand and walk, to run, to read, to call my mother’s name, and to sing using only mouth-carved breath, a storm music developed in Little England and used here to duplicate the sounds of trains, automobiles, and crashing waves. Despite everything that has happened, and everything I desired to happen that never did, I can still soothe myself with this kind of music. Pantomime Water operates under the principle that water is the purest medium to store the details of behavior. When my mother placed a jar of water in the Learning Room and then walked circles around it, the water recorded the principles of walking—it witnessed and reflected her motion—so if I drank from the jar, I absorbed the instructions and could then walk myself. The implications of this type of water-based instruction—to drink the source code of any task—are quite broad, and should soon lead to a widespread behavior-sharing system that will eliminate most notions of expertise and special skills. Basic tasks like mowing, painting, fishing, and hunting will be made available as affordable soft drinks. There