HIPPOS
by
Janet Amalia Weinberg
Sharon is in the office supply closet sorting files and folders when she overhears two men making fun of her. With trembling hands, she cracks open the closet door and peeks out.
“She’s such a hippopotamus,” says her manager.
The sales rep laughs and imitates her lumbering walk. “Galump... galump….”
Sharon clutches her face to keep from crying.
At quitting time, the memory of the men’s taunts follow her to the bus stop.
Hippopotamus…
Galump…
Her own inner voice joins the attack: I’m so ugly. No man will ever want me.
She walks past the bus stop.
So ugly…
And keeps walking.
No man…
When she finally looks around to see where she is, Sharon finds herself at the zoo. She wanders past penguins and peacocks and chimpanzees, too busy hating herself to notice. The next time she wonders where she is, she’s standing in front of two pigmy hippos--enormous over-inflated black pig-like creatures with huge snouts and stumpy
legs.
Sharon figures the smaller one, devouring a pile of greens, is female and the other, clumping around the pen, is male.
She stares at their oily, hairless bodies. So ugly, she thinks.
The male waddles toward the female with an ungainly gait.
Her back is to him but she stops feeding, sniffs.
He pauses behind her, jabs his snout into her rear.
She lets him.
Suddenly, these hulking creatures begin a sensual dance.
The male hippo rubs his body along the female’s flank. Slowly… tenderly….
She leans into him as if she loves being stroked.
He nuzzles the crook of her neck.
She tilts her head to receive his caress.
Sharon watches, transported....
“Mmmmm.” The sound of her own sigh surprises Sharon. Did anyone hear? She quickly checks.
Not far off, a man is leaning against a tree, smiling.
She feels exposed--an ugly blob like her, having sexual fantasies. And in public.
The man looks straight into her.
She lowers her eyes.
“Beautiful,” he says. “Aren’t they?”
“Huh?” Sharon assumes he’s sarcastic. But his smile seems sincere.
She watches the courting couple again and something in her shifts.
This time, Sharon meets the man’s penetrating gaze with a smile. “They really CAN be beautiful,” she says. Then adds, more to herself than him, “And it has nothing to do with how they look.”
Janet Amalia Weinberg's credits include essays in New Age Travel and New Renaissance and short stories in Grand Times, Wild Violet, West Wind Review, Reader’s Break, etc., as well as in an anthology she edited (STILL GOING STRONG; MEMOIRS, STORIES, AND POEMS ABOUT GREAT OLDER WOMEN). The anthology, an Independent Publisher Award Finalist, is a collection that inspires and entertains while countering commonly held negative views of later life. She lives in upstate New York. Contact her.
