Gyant DaMidget suffered from a severe case of mental emergency that made him allergic to mirrors. His growing rage and paranoia threatened to swallow him in broad daylight; he felt like he was physically shrinking in his skin, getting smaller as the world got bigger. His formerly rotund body now shagged like a skeleton under his giant boubous. His face was visibly smaller and darker than it used to be. And his lips were growing drier by the day. He tried to put up a brave face and to maintain his habitual bravado. But deep inside, Gyant DaMidget felt as if he was literally sinking into the ground and there was nothing he could do to arrest that frightening prospect.
With every passing day, Gyant DaMidget’s obsession with clinging onto power grew more consuming, more blinding, and more painfully acute. Threatening the west did not work, but he continued barking at the west anyway, like an angry wolf howling and barking after the passing clouds. Taking the many precautions prescribed by his hordes of marabouts, sorcerers and oracles did not help either. His routine sacrifices of innocent humans, black bulls, black dogs, black cats and black cocks in the middle of the nights seemed useless. The burning rage in his rock-like heart grew hotter with every single minute, as if a red hot furnace blazed stubbornly in his chest, burning away the flesh even in the middle of the coldest nights. Yet while his heart felt like fire, his soul felt as if it was buried in mountains of frozen ice in the middle of winter. No respite from the heat; no respite from the freezing cold. His only momentary respite lay in consulting more and more marabouts, sorcerers and oracles that divined the future and told him how to avoid his inevitable fate.
While Gyant DaMidget never inspired pity from many people in No Talk Republic, he nevertheless presented a sorry spectacle as he shrunk physically and mentally, as he sweat profusely and froze with cold at the same time, all the time. He knew that the clock was ticking, that time was moving inexorably forward, carrying him along. He was utterly frustrated that all his human, black cow, black sheep, black dog and black cat sacrifices had not succeeded in making time stand still so he could forever stay in power. He was frustrated that all the lawless codes he imposed, all the arrests and imprisonments of innocent people he committed, all the money he had stolen, all the voices he had silenced, all the sorcerer’s, marabouts and oracles he had consulted, all the yinkering he had done, all the insults he had hauled at local critics and western enemies – all these had proved useless in the face of his uncontrollable stumbling and bumbling towards eventual irrelevance and oblivion. They had all failed to stop his strange loss of weight, his increasing darkness of face. They had all failed to make him feel even a modicum of joy in his burning heart or any semblance of security in spite of his angry gun-toting, fierce-looking and trigger-happy military entourage and death squads. What was he to do? Gyant DaMidget had no clue.
Well, he continued pretending that he was the invincible superman; he continued importing marabouts, sorcerers and oracles from far and wide. Every couple of weeks, his marabout, sorcerer and oracle hunters flew in a new sorcerer, oracle or marabout to do some consultations for the desperate tyrant. Following their advice, Gyant DaMidget committed murders in the middle of the nights for his human sacrifices; he fired and arrested individual ministers and other top civil servants; he banned working on Fridays and speaking English in No Talk Republic; he decreed that no one must think of human rights, the rule of law, democracy, or foreign affairs in No Talk Republic. In his latest display of erratic lawlessness, Gyant DaMidget decreed that no one must play soccer in the rainy season or go to private classes during the summer holidays. Apparently, his latest oracle had warned him to beware any significant gathering of young people during the rainy season because some young people were planning to protest against him. So anyone who dared play soccer or attend summer school was to be arrested and charged with disobeying royal orders or giving false information to a public official.
Still, Gyant DaMidget could not find any peace of mind; he could not get rid of the fire burning in his heart or the freezing cold sticking to his person like a layer of invisible skin. He could not bring himself to feel big or powerful or relevant. Instead, he felt increasingly small and insignificant, as if the world was expanding all around him; as if his clothes were getting bigger every day; as if he was falling into a deep bottomless pit; as if the skies were slowly but surely threatening to press down and crush him unto the face of the earth. Gyant DaMidget had thought that he could do whatever he liked with innocent human lives; that he could arrest, jail or kill anyone he wanted; that he could silence the whole wide world; that he could make nature do his bidding even while he was violating the laws of nature with every thoughtless action he took. Ultimately, Gyant DaMidget thought he could deny others their humanity while maintaining his own. The realization that dehumanizing others inevitably equals dehumanizing himself often crossed his mind; but like everything else that did not match his own version of reality, this realization was promptly expelled from his mind through a damaging process of clinging onto convenient truths.
Things got so bad that Gyant DaMidget dreaded looking at himself in the mirror. That was when he decided to ban all mirrors at State House and at his personal palace. He was seriously considering banning the use of mirrors in No Talk Republic. In fact, there was always the mirror of life that every living person was perpetually forced to look into. There was no way he could avoid looking into that mirror of life and whenever he did, he shrank from the terrifyingly image that stared back at him; the image he had created and that stuck to him like a layer of skin, making him shiver with cold under 100 degree weather conditions even with his giant boubous on. Eventually, Gyant DaMidget was going to undo himself even as he tried to make himself the grand lord and master of life itself.