From a distance, it looks like a boar. Its giant tusks knock over trees as it cuts through the forest – and it does it as easily as if it were gliding through a grassy meadow. On its head, or what one could think of as a head, is something that looks like a weathervane or a satellite dish, and it turns in jerky circles like a sprinkler. Nearby, and flapping around like a broken wing, is what remains of an eye; it’s a twisted mass of wires and broken glass.
The beast clambers over the landscape, practically steps over hills, its aged gears humming, turning.
Nuclear-powered. Thermal conductive aluminum hairs to keep the core cool. Metal skin. Radioactive off-gasses.
Small explosions from within as it switches between modes, and then it lumbers to a halt in the middle of a river, blocking the water’s flow. And there it sleeps as the river floods its banks.
It’s not a bear, a bear’s much too small, but it is alive. Born of a new kind of speciation. Rotary blades. Drill-like teeth. Whirring. Clicking. Panting mechanically.
A hatch near its neck or shoulder blades begins to open, and a disc hovers, like a drone, from out from within. It pauses, as if lost in thought, and then shoots up even higher. A noise comes from it, like an alarm or mating call, like a dial-up modem, all squeaks and chirps, as if in love, as if desperate, like a cricket’s guiro. The disc peers into a haze of lidar data, searching for a correlation, solving for X. It finds nothing and the disc is lowered back into the darkness of the hatch hole.
The creature moves out of the water and onto the plains. Old roadways criss-cross its path, and with its massive jaws it eats asphalt and concrete as if they were ripe fruits. Teeth jackhammering pieces apart. Old buildings, walls, bricks and mortar – all roll down into its portly gullet. It eats civilizations.
There are things that follow in its wake. Not nearly as large, but as equally strange and unusual. Something that looks like a bag of tongues. A mouse-centipede-like hybrid of features. The beast catches something that looks like a dragonfly, and crunches it – the thing pops in its mouth with what could have been a small nuclear explosion. The micepedes keep their distance, as if they know how dangerous the bear-boar can be.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.