AS A CAST OUT, JACK HAD HID, living downtown away from El Fornio for several months before coming to live at the sta-tion. With no canyons or trees to hide behind, he ate cereal out of little boxes, drank water from odd faucets. He looked in shop windows, slept in mall niches, nearly blind and feeling the world with his hands, wondering when he would be taken away. It was one Sunday afternoon, watching the families lined up for movies, that he came upon a box of books left in a dumpster. He sorted through the lot, tossing out romance novels, cookbooks, thrillers, ending up with a sturdy load of reference books which he began to read from daily with their classifications of plants and animals, diagrams, captions, explanations and maps. But it was the dark green hardback, Standards & Marks, with its brown-edged acidic pages, exercises with marks about the type, which instructed Jack he might be around longer than he had expected.    There was a time, mid- to late-1800s, when editorial marks used two different kinds of deletions. The first was the mark of total deletion, the well known strike-through line going up then piggy tail exiting right. The second kind—known formally as the conditional deletion or colloquially as the cross-out—was simply a line through the word at the halfway point of the ex-height, as if a long iron poker had been laid across the collected letters in question. The conspicuous absence of the line going up and accompanying piggy tail meant that the word was up for replacement but had a real chance at remaining, with the right editorial jockeying, of course.    The mark was popular with newspaper people as editors and writers used it to comment back and forth to one an-other—cross-outs being less like REVISION MARKS: ON as they were actually primitive in-boxes where one could leave coded remarks for another to peruse. The tool was used by the entire graduating class of the ill-fated, one year charter, Free Army Hospital (motto “Audivi ubi fuisset, numero ad duodecim.”). Although it was not free, the army or even a hospital, it was a college. Several of its graduates went on to use the editorial style in the profes-sional world, most notably spiritualist/historian Marianne Emily who brought the device with her when she became editor at The Moorish Carriage, a quarterly dedicated to proving the existence and exploits of an Eli al Cambiaz and his pupil, Raafiya. Legend had it that al Cambiaz and his student charge had survived the onslaught of Isabel and Fernidad’s soldiers against the Moors, members of which they may or may not have been as the exact ethnic identities of al Cambiaz and Raafiya have never been established.    After crossing the straits, the two of them regrouped in Chechaouene for a time, where it has been noted that the boy Raafiya was marked in the Berber way, an act which nearly cost him his sight. When he had recovered, the two of them headed north by boat towards Hibernia where they supposedly died en route, drowning when their boat was swamped in a storm. Ms. Emily dedicated the last issue of The Carriage, as it was called by local illuminati, to following up leads in Ireland where one or both of the figures were purported to have actually landed and lived out their full lives, leading one skeptical academic to remark of the story that it was “a Dark Irish myth within a Dark Irish myth.”    Unfortunately, Ms. Emily and her traveling companion both died of ptomaine poisoning a week into their trip, bringing an end to both the project and the publication. Re-cords from the local constable point to a feast of bad lamb that went around a festival prepared especially in Ms. Emily’s honor.    To this day there are still people claiming to be the descendants of either al Cambiaz or Raafiya. Whether their claims are true or not is still a matter of speculation, although they all share the same common traits: dark skin, noble noses and thick, black almost oriental hair. A classmate of Marianne Emily’s, A. Lee Greynya, used the marking of deletions as well, teaching its usage to the well-known groups of summer and research interns he stocked at his farm during production of some of his more copious and encyclopedic works. His famous Dream Days of the Spanish and The Fisherman, (including the two hundred page intro-duction) were constructed using the marking of deletions device. His most accessible work, I Was Married to Cleopatra, utilized the nineteenth century editorial teaching as well. The official use of the technique, (Editorial Standards & Marks, 1945) stops around 1939, when Greynya’s son last employed its usage at “Vintners, The Monograph Printers,” demonstrating and instructing the technique to the entire editorial staff of three. “Vintners” lasted approximately nine months, with six issues making it into the hands of readers. Half of those were purported to be comps and thumbnail sketches. The total cost to Greynya was just under a fifty thousand dollars of his own money—inherited from his fa-ther’s now dwindling literary estate—although Greynya, Jr. was able to maintain the buildings and land. The estate was eventually sold by his heirs to the adjacent university which came in, broke up the presses, melted down the type for ce-ramic kiln ballast and turned the buildings into the school’s new computer lab—not even a thought given to changing of the guard ceremonies.    The marking of deletions was lost with the break up of the last of the Greynya editorial teams. Only the cosmos ever thinks about it any more, as Jack was certain he was not marked by a cumulonimbus-inspired god and his towerly pen but by all his dire angels and dominions, powers and thrones who rolled out the goodies like a traveling theater group, saying these are the truly godly things—the rocks and sand dollars, black widows and oak trees, bones, baseball gloves, vulture in his warm arroyo with the Troll and the Invisible Ones—they are the most important. The world cannot have just one god as it needs all the imaginary fairies it can conjure.    Over Jack these principals fought. He had lasted the rounds of discussion and drink, smoking and late night calls to home like an argument ironed out just minutes before the presses rolled. The piggy tail mark was erased, leaving only the straight line through.