I am alone. Day after day I look out through the glassy eye holes of my windows on a blank empty world that has abandoned me to my fate. This is quarantine. This is hell. Here inside the damp viscous walls of the Midgarsomr's vast gut tube, everything is reduced to a dull, despairing sameness. I pace the rooms of my house, walk down eerie corridors of dead trees, twisted and bleached, that line the world spanning miles of Jormungand's innards, but to what purpose for the view never changes. The emptiness, the silence, weigh on my more and more, shading into clawing panic that I am being slowly smothered, here sealed away from wind and sun, as well as other, more intangible, forms of sustenance, like the company of other living creatures.
At first, I wait for my comrades to seek out the Beast and liberate me. Oh I know not even the Gods, certainly no mortal, can defeat the Midgardsomer. But, surely, they could do something, open a slit in Its side while It sleeps to allow me to slip out or feed It something that would induce It to regurgitate me back up. I wait and wait, ears pealed for the phone, with its video game battle music ring tone, to go off, checking my email and social media several times a day, praying desperately for anything, any sign at all that help is on the way, that, even if they cannot free me, at least they want to try, that I am valued, I am missed. But in vain. The sign for which I long never comes.
Instead, it's been announced on midgardsnakefriends.com that my companions are meeting in the mead hall and my heart aches to be there with them but I am mewed up behind the bars of Jormundgand's teeth and tongue. And I am too ashamed to tell them so. Considering that they all, somehow evaded the Beast's belly, to reveal that I am unable to do so will mark me as weak or, worse, deviant, or, worst of all, will not to be taken seriously. Since they were all able to get free with no problem, my inability to do so could simply be seen as a sign that I'm just not trying hard enough. And so I have to sit helpless as I watch them from this great distance go rejoice without me, knowing that now, even if I get free, it won't make a difference, won't be special to them, because they are all back together again, doing just fine without me. I spend the entire day camped on midgardsnakefriends.com, constantly refreshing the page for updates, desperately praying that they will at least say something about how my lack was felt, how much better it would have been if I had been there. No dice. Their words are only of joy at the association renewed. I might as well not exist.
My employment dries up, despite the fact that I was an early adopter of online instruction, now have many years, too many years, of experience with it and am probably one of the most qualified individuals to work in world-devoured-by-God-Snake conditions. But, exactly when I should be at my most valuable, I suddenly discover all my usefulness has dissolved into smoke blown away on the wind so that I find myself looking down in dumb surprise at my abrupt lack of support like a coyote on a cliff side. The specialized skill I spent years perfecting, holding my own by doing the job that needed to be done that many of my peers couldn't or wouldn't do, is suddenly no longer specialized and I find myself kicked several landings down the seniority stair, back past the massive number of individuals with more years of teaching experience total but significantly less in this particular, now crucial, modality. That makes no logical sense at all but I long ago learned The System doesn't care, not about logic, or quality, or the fact that, despite my many years of good service, I am no longer able to even pretend to be capable of making a living.
I try various other pathetically desperate ways of earning money, that further depress and exhaust me, none of which really pan out, like how in a grasping attempt to get even a minimum number of courses I resort to designing my own. But then the people who need to review and approve it keep dropping the ball so it stretches into a three years process and then, when it finally gets put through, almost no students sign up for it, a drawn out costly failure on every level. Sure, I could try harder, everyone could always try harder. Failure is always your own fault. But I no longer have any motivation, given the constantly mounting evidence that I am completely unneeded, serve absolutely no useful purpose in the world. Both my friends and my job never show the slightest ill effect from my lack, only grudgingly acknowledge me if I obnoxiously make my presence known.
Worst of all, there is no hiding from the fact that all the years of suffering, the emotional wrestling with PantsFish and his ilk, it was all in vain. Even if I could somehow defend my thesis from inside Jormundgand's belly, it wouldn't do any good. At the level of work I'm doing now an extra $500 a course wouldn't even bring me back up to where I was before, when I was already barely scraping by. In my despair, I stop changing the page on the calendar, but this is not simple apathy. It is a deliberate choice, my attempt to imitate Dickens's Miss Havisham with whom I've long identified, leaving the wall-mounted date unaltered, just like she stopped all her clocks, unable to bear seeing the cherished moment fade into the past, its promise unfulfilled, sitting in the proud isolation of her rotting bridal gown through all the long years, unable to accept the ultimate finality of putting it off. Like her, I was on the cusp of the greatest event of my life when it was suddenly snatched out from under me and so I struggle desperately and ultimately futilely, to stop time.
Despite what the calendar says, time is passing but it's easy to forget that fact given the horrible oppressive sameness. Without reliable work, I don't even have the rhythm of the semester to give me some anchor, however tenuous. More bare ground, more gloomy trees, gradually forgetting what the outside world looked like, forgetting what it was like to go to the gym, feeling my strength and ability, my warriorhood, that I fought so long and hard for, wither more and more while I remain trapped, helpless to prevent it. In this way and in this way alone the passage of time is painfully obvious and significant. I pause under one of the drained gray trees with a particularly prominent low hanging limb, not giving myself time to think before I disregard the most basic safety precautions, stretching up on tip toe then giving a small hop to wrap my hands around the branch, smooth and desiccated as sun-bleached driftwood, desperate to do a pull up or lean back and lift toes to bar. I am so starved for the rush of testing myself in battle that I have no care if my rashness results in a fall and broken neck. At least then I'll die a warrior.
And, as I've been warned many times it may, the branch breaks under my weight and sends me sprawling, knocking the wind out of me but leaving me otherwise unhurt, but not before my inability to execute even the most basic of feats was made obvious. I lie on my back in the waxy gray-green moss, staring up through the twisting branches to the colorless sky beyond as I struggle to catch my breath and all I can think is what an utter failure I am and how I am completely unable to do anything about it. A line of white knobbly shapes marches along the sky above me and I focus on them as an alternative to the agonizing thoughts of my current state. They appear tiny from here but I realize up close they must be huge, like the towering clouds I would sometimes see during my voyages to work on my dissertation and that memory gives an added twinge to the ache I already feel in my back as I suddenly realize what I'm looking at: the line of the Midgardsomr's vertebrae running along the roof of my prison. Yes, I realize the cliche where you can see the spine and ribs from within the stomach of the swallowing beast is biologically impossible. But Jormungand is a literal God. It can do what It wants with regards to the aesthetics of Its innards.
As I lie there, trying to muster the will to rise again, I am unable to stop my brain from desperately raising the question that I've been dreading since the moment the Beast burst from the sea: Why? Why did this happen? For what sadistic reason did all my well laid schemes for which I worked and suffered so gang agley at the eleventh hour? The reason I don't want to ask this question is because I already know the answer, at least the one that would be a no-brainer in the New Age, feminist circles in which I've spent most of my adult life. Their explanation would be that, because warriorhood is inherently bad, my attachment to it needs to be severed...for my own good. In a paradigm where this form of masculinity is considered questionable at best, even for men, the idea of a woman wanting to adopt it contrary to her inherent loving, life-affirming nature is deviant to an extreme degree. And so, my moment of victory that would have confirmed my value as a warrior was taken from me. Even the more day to day validation I got from my accomplishments at the gym had to go. I'm not allowed to have an adversary to motivate me. Even an impersonal force like the environment or circumstances can't be an adversary because that's just the universe carrying out its plan of what's best for me and I need to embrace the lesson or the suffering will keep getting worse.
"Bring it on," I mutter savagely as I drag myself to my feet, unable to imagine what suffering could be worse than the utter annihilation of no longer being myself. Of course, they would argue, this isn't my real self, just an illusion I've become attached to because of the twisted values of my society and, if I would just let go, I'd find the real me deep down, which would conveniently match the values they think everyone should hold. Defiantly, I pull out my phone, a foreign make that I selected specially for its suitableness for playing metal, because, instead of having ten different cameras, its volume and bass capacity significantly outstrips almost every other phone, and start blasting Brothers of Metal's "Powersnake," directly confronting the wretched circumstances in which I find myself.
A quiver ripples along the skeletal skyscape. The very air seems charged. At first I think it is a response to my angry challenge but as the song goes on, it gradually it comes to me that what I sense is listening, eager and intent. The earth under my feet, the corpse gray roof overhead, all are suffused with it. And, in my own bones, I understand. It is Jormungand Itself that is listening, fascinating by what could well pass as a hymn honoring Itself and one, moreover that does not censor or sugar-coat any of the dark truths about It, instead reveling in all Its glorious monstrousness. The song ends and in the silence that follows I sense through the currents of the air around me, as clear as if it were spoken aloud, the desire for me to play it again. Overcome with awe I toggle the loop setting on my phone and, as it continues to cycle, I start to hear in the back of the background a strange thrumming, a bass to end all bass. And still it grows and grows until the very ground beneath me vibrates with it, like the breathing of a great cat. The Midgard Serpent is purring.
From then on, as I wend on my weary way, I can often feel the Presence all around me. It may be my jailer but I begin to feel a kind of reluctant sympathy for It. After all, It is lonely too, cast out from the only society It had ever known while still young, sundered from Its parents and siblings, though It has doubtless heard of Their sad fates since then, an exile with no place to belong, no people to call Its own, wretched and alone, Earm-An-Ormr. Who can blame it for wanting vengeance? Certainly not I when I am regularly consumed with bitterness and rage towards my companions who went feasting without me. Both rejected and cut off from contact with our fellows we have found a kindred spirit in each other. It is always eager to hear the song again and I sometimes indulge It by singing along and It will join me with Its sub-woofer purr. Almost without realizing I give the Beast an affectionate nick-name, start referring to It as Jormun, my own dear abomination. Whenever I use the name, I feel the ground beneath me give a little lurch, like a cat trying to rub against its human to lay claim to its property. Once I kneel down and run my hands through the ghastly pallid moss, giving It a belly rub from the inside out and the purring gets so intense the whole landscape rocks around me.
The lack of either work or social interaction means I have a ridiculous amount of free time on my hands. God-Snakes that have swallowed you don't count according to sane people. I tell myself I should try to take up my study of dead languages again to fill the solitude but can never quite motivate myself to do so. I waste a disgusting amount of time on the internet, and even then, it's in the least productive way possible. Absently scratching the half-remembered itch of my life-long love of miniatures, I search for what's on offer on the world-serpent wide web of Old Jormun's neural network. Sure I'm trapped in here now but, I still feel a pang remembering that this intangibility is all that's existed of this hobby for years. Last time I went to the kitschy tourist village near the place I grew up, the little cottage shop that sold dollhouse miniatures, always one of the high points of my visits there as a child, had closed down and this became yet one more thing that I would never again be able to see with my eyes or touch with my fingers, reduced forever to empty images. Now I discover that that you can buy kits to build extremely intricate dollhouse dioramas, like seriously, they're so tiny and detailed that the mere prospect makes me start drooling. Not only that, but the reviews are full of people talking about how they are the perfect thing to fill the enforced empty hours. And I want to. I want to so badly. But I can never get off my ass and actually order one. After all, that would require me making the mental effort to actual select one as well committing to somehow sustain the ongoing motivation to keep working on the thing. That or add it to the growing list as yet another costly failure.
Instead I spend far too much time doom scrolling, following one link after another in an every increasing downward spiral of accusatory and invalidating content. Even though I've finished my thesis, and can't do anything with it anyway, I am completely unable to stop torturing myself, websites for what, back in my youth were women's magazines, relationship advice forums, online quiz sites asking "how flirty are you?" and "is he into you?" the self-same content with which I've been punishing myself, at least intermittently, since I was a teenager, reading over and over again in a thousand different forms how I am a feminine failure, how no one will ever want me because of that, and how the fact that, despite how much that prospect hurts, the thought of being otherwise makes me sick is a sign I have serious insecurity issues and need to work on my self confidence, as that is the only possible explanation for such feelings. I realize with a sinking heart that while I didn't have any issues with self confidence when I started being smothered in such content some thirty years ago, I most assuredly do now, that the constant unequivocal linking of confidence and success with feminine sexuality has caused my disgust at the latter to bleed over onto former. As the years have passed, I've drawn into myself more and more, become increasingly reluctant to assert myself, at least partially from the fear that if I am successful and assured people will automatically see me as embracing my female sexuality or even that the two things are so inextricably connected that becoming the first will inevitably brainwash me into doing the second.
I also start spending rampantly. I mean really crazy spending, goth clothes, fantasy elven jewelry, giant platform heels, make-up in every shade of the jumbo crayon box, all the stuff I've been wistfully stalking online for years but would never allow myself to buy, too hard-nosed and practical to let myself indulge, things it would be totally socially inappropriate for someone my age to even think about wearing. But at this point, I no longer care about practicality or social propriety. The word on worldserpentnews.com is that people are really letting themselves go in isolation because no one can see them. I go to the opposite extreme, dressing myself to the nines every day, painting my lips and nails and eyelids, then hopefully finding a way to add glitter. It's oddly freeing to, for once in my life, be able to dress like a dark elf hooker and have no fears that anyone will get the wrong idea and think I'm confident and sexy.
I embark on an intense regime of skin care, which, of course, means yet more money bled away on product and devices. Considering, that I've now reached the age where, as a woman, I become "unfuckable," even though part of me never wanted to be otherwise, I figure I need to start working overtime to hide that fact, even if its only from my own reflection in the mirror, lest I look even more laughably pathetic in my extravagant get up, haunted by the memory, crystal clear even after all this time of my first year in college when one of the employees in the main building for my department reached the dreaded birthday and her co-workers "celebrated" by papering all the halls and stairwells, even the elevator, with pictures showing a flawless bikini-clad super model, claiming it was a picture of her at 11:59 the night before her birthday, followed by pictures of the most decrepit, undesirable hag imaginable, supposedly another picture of her taken one minute later.
But then, as far as money and good sense are concerned, it's nearly impossible to feel any obligation to control my spending when doing so is already out of the question due to the obscene amount I'm forced to shell out for groceries. What I used to be able to get at the local super-market for maybe a hundred dollars, can now cost up to four times that on sites like jormuncart.com and that's not even counting all the delivery fees. And then an order can take over a week to arrive, by which time half the items will be sold out anyway, so comparison shopping is impossible. I have to take any delivery slot or accept any replacement available no matter how costly because it's likely to be that or nothing. Besides, why bother planning or saving for the future when you may suddenly have no future? Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we become Jormun's lunch.
One pulsing artery of the inter-snake net leads to another, each branching into a thousand threads of capillaries. I take a peek down one and, the next thing I know, the entire day is over, hours gone without realizing, combing the infinite permutations of all the reasons I am awful or all the things I want to buy and the realization that the time has flown yet again to no good end, just makes me all the more miserable. Time has flown, but I cannot. On the most basic level there is my prison from which I am painfully aware I am powerless to fly. And given that they lie beyond its walls, all other more literal forms of flight are out of the question. I mourn nostalgically for the exhilaration of my ocean voyages no matter how exhausting or how I felt about the purpose behind them, to say nothing of more personal forms of flight.
©Amanda RR Hamlin 2026
