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Swen
Gnillor, Swen Gnikaerb and Other Monsters
Those
voracious beasts, who constantly need to be fed.
While most people’s wilderness period involves a
sustained period of...well, wilderness, Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse,
and her beloved Chihuahua Mitzy were not so lucky. Enthralled in the labyrinth
of ice by the melancholy if not down-right depressed Eyes, a creature mainly
formed of two orbits six feet in diameter or the size of a grown man, with just
a squiggle, like a rash of toothpaste suggesting a body somewhere in the dimmed
hinterland of his acclimatized Arctic prison- Mary Mary felt the pin-point
world-weary dread streaming empathetically from the doleful Eyes pursuing her along the chilly plasmas of the
maze. That she had unwittingly become Eyes’ captive was clear. Unsolicited,
Eyes had incrementally invited Mary Mary to snippets of impending gloom and
doom; these tsunamis of emotion, like the Geo-Astro charts beneath Eyes’
glacial desk, were noisily projected along the pallid avenues through the
frosted sheets of ice.
If the exercise was designed to make Mary Mary crave
for a Halcyon time of tranquility and blissful ignorance, it was working. Perversely,
she thought of the relative calm of the Western world’s use of heavy metal
music played incessantly at maximum volume to Muslim captives locked inside
freight containers by trailer-trash in
uniform; Meat Loaf on a loop was dulcet tones to Mary Mary, even water-boarding
promised momentary respite in the face of this sensory overload. Through
Eyes’ unfortunate squint the baleful misery was being distorted as all baleful
misery usually is; as she ran through the maze with Mitzy at her heels, Mary
Mary was convinced she was being chased by Eyes’ monstrous blood hounds Swen Gnikaerb and Swen
Gnillor, for Eyes’ squint distorted sound and the unrelenting poly- and cacophonic
call could only have come from the hysteria of ice-cold words floating on a
blood-red river; like the native in the jungle who possessed the Complete Works
of Dickens but who had lost his sight and
chanced upon a young and lost English explorer; Eyes did not plan to let the
sole audience for his erratic enthusiastic expositions of gleeful woe escape.
Amid the lurid depictions of war, terrorism, hate,
recrimination, beards, kurtas, suits, weaponry and a chart-topping medley of
riots; the general racket of little less
than half a dozen species of coral on the move and vying for space, Mary Mary’s
will was even more determined to get as far away from the invisible tide she felt streaming like a toxic miasma through
the byways, lanes and streets, thickest,
dun silver, at the labyrinthine cities, or junctions and main thoroughfare of
expectation. She ran as the screams of Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb bore down
on her unseen but perniciously inducing fear in whispering curlicues and soporific
wisps.
She imagined Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb to be
hounds for she also imagined that their names were being heralded and barked as
though their very pronouncement was meant to stun the listener like rabbits in
headlights. Lamped, Mary Mary could imagine being immediately dragged down by
the drum-beat under-tow of fear and like billions of other sleepwalking coral
bloom pulled toward The Great Pacific Garbage Patch of history.
Her mind as scrambled as her metaphors she made a perpendicular dash across a directionless intersection of dread heading towards a door marked ‘Waiting Room’. She picked up her beloved pet and barged her way through the door and into the early nineteen eighties and immediately wished she hadn’t. The baying of Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb ceased.
Sat around
glowering at her were twenty septuagenarians; failed actors in the history of
their own lives they were preparing for yet another apoplectic eruption at no
one and about nothing in particular; they watched in horror as the stack of faded but
fanatically arranged editions of Uebermensch Monthly began to topple .
As twenty pairs of hands stretched out to restore order to the impending disorder, through the collective prism of obsessive rectitude, (curiously missed by the Allies' Re-Civilisation Program), from inside the Waiting Room Mary Mary noticed as the letters, which had been pursuing her through the glacial maze, were now reversing in order; Swen Gnillor and Swen Gnikaerb, now read: ‘Rolling News’ and ‘Breaking News’ respectively.
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