Dear Pansy,
Since my mother is in the market for a new dog, I’ve been thinking about pets. After the whole rhinoceros debacle, I realized that rhinos aren’t actually very fierce. They look badass with that horn and all, but they just don’t have what it takes in a clinch. So, I went looking for the ultimate in badass. Something that wasn’t just death on four legs, but could handle both land and water.
We got a hippopotamus.
Of course, Daddy, who has seen Fantasia one too many times, immediately wanted to put a cute little tutu on it. I’ll tell you one thing: hippos are supposed to be herbivores, but this one had no problem snapping two of Daddy’s fingers off and swallowing them right down. Good thing he’s already left-handed. The vet thinks that the ingestion of meat might upset the hippos’ delicate tummy, but for fuck sake, after a stunt like that, it deserves some indigestion.
So, the hippo’s out in the creek. It just sits there, mostly submerged, for hours at a time. I thought about putting a television out there so that it could at least watch Downton Abbey while it bathed, but it seems content just watching the trees and the birds. Funny thing, though – by this time of year that guy who comes wading upstream to measure the depth of the creek has usually been here, leaving behind his trail of red thread. We found a big-ass snarl of red thread, but it seems to just stop a little way downstream. Oh well, government cutbacks…
The hippo likes to climb the hillsides. Most of the periwinkle is gone (thank goodness – we thought we’d have to get goats to do the job), and the hippo has started going up the neighbor’s side of the bank because I think it smells the nice hay her horses are eating. I can just imagine it talking to her horses. “Hey, guys, can I have some? Are you horses? That’s awesome – I’m a horse too! I’m what they call a ‘river horse.’ Fat? Screw you, buddy! I’m not fat! Don’t be putting your body image issues off on me! You’re just lucky there’s a fence between us, asshole! One more crack like that and I’ll use my ‘substantial fundament’ to break down that flimsy goddamn fence and break your pitiful stick legs, got that?” Okay…maybe I’m imagining too much, here
Anyway, I should get back to it. I love and miss you and hope everything’s going great.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
Well, the hippo is getting along just fine. We didn’t name it yet, in no small part because we wanted to find out whether we were going to get a boy or a girl, but the truth is that we haven’t been able to find out. When it’s not in the water, it keeps its face to us, its tiny red eyes staring at us suspiciously. Daddy finds it alarming, but I prefer to think that it’s just trying to remember our faces so that it knows who its friends are. Which is why we’re still alive, unlike the poor, mangled coyote we found on the creek bank. Well, what do you expect if you’re something the size of a coyote, fucking with a full-grown hippo?
The dogs have taken to just standing at the top steps of the porch and barking nonstop at it. If the stuff I read on the internet is right, then the yawning the hippo is doing in the direction of the little doggies isn’t a good sign. Luckily, there’s no way the hippo is getting up the creek bank and across the deck before the doggies high-tail it inside.
I’d better go. Oh, one last thing: Daddy has bought a trebuchet. He’s using it to huck heads of lettuce into the creek. He’s trying to train the hippo to catch. He’s also calling the hippo “Leon,” which I guess is as good a name as any. Unless the hippo is a girl, in which case Daddy may lose a few more fingers.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
Spring is here and the weather is getting warmer. We still don’t know the gender of the hippopotamus, but I guess that’s neither here nor there, since it’s not like we have another hippopotamus for it to interact with. It’s been just sitting there, up to its ears in the creek while Daddy chucks lettuces, cabbages, heads of bok choy… Let me just say that you’ve never really lived until you’ve been on the receiving end of a hippopotamus burp. Sounds travel faster than smells, so first you get the alligator roar of the burp itself, throaty and fruity and full of vaguely porcine expression. Then the smell hits you like a punch in the face. Sure, it’s cabbage, but cabbage that has been to the gates of Hell and been transformed into some ageless and unspeakable evil before being sent back to earth to flay the flesh from the living. I was wearing one of my favorite t-shirts the first time the hippo burped on me. I had to burn it.
And you know how hippos mark their territory, right? They shit, while wagging their tiny little tails back and forth as quickly as possible, spraying the shit over a wide area all around the back of the hippo. Meanwhile, either you’re standing around behind the hippo, covered in shit and now part of its territory, or you’re standing around in front of the hippo while it looks at you with a look that plainly says “I don’t care what you think you own. This is mine.” Or you’re me, safely inside the house, drinking heavily and being grateful that hippos don’t have thumbs and therefore can’t work doorknobs.
We all love and miss you. Except the hippo. It doesn’t miss anyone.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
I’m tired and grouchy.
The whole hippopotamus thing may have been, in retrospect, a mistake. We’ve now got people coming down to the creek all the time to see the hippo, like it’s some free zoo. People think that because it lives at our house, it’s tame. We’ve posted signs all over saying “Danger: This hippo WILL eat your ass if you don’t leave now.” We’ve put up surveillance cameras and I’ve stopped watching anything on Netflix, because now I’m just watching jackasses try to sneak onto our property without anyone noticing, and then realizing that the hippo is:
1) awake
2) faster than they thought
3) always hungry
4) NOT a fast or merciful killer
It doesn’t seem to matter that we’ve got more human remains scattered around our property than Sauron – that doesn’t seem to deter anybody.
Yesterday, some jackass decided that he was going to re-enact Disney’s jungle cruise. He had a sad little boat, and he was standing in the front dressed in his silly khaki shorts and pith helmet. He’s doing his whole Disney patter thing “…and if you look to your left – what do we have here?! – it’s a hippo! They say that hippos are just about to charge when their ears wiggle. Let’s see if we can get just a bit clo-” and at that point, the hippo submerges and comes up under the stupid little boat. All the people are sitting on the side away from the hippo, which makes the boat totally easy to tip. Now there’s an upended boat, an idiot in a pith helmet screaming like a chimp, a bunch of New York ecotourists who’re trying to snap pictures even as the hippo is bearing down on them, and a pack of fat German tourists, treading water because they think this is part of the ride. And there’s the hippo, picking off whatever’s moving the slowest – tour guide first.
I’ll say this for the record: hippos do not wiggle their ears just before charging.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
I woke up this morning with Calvin banging at the bedroom window with his big nostrilly face, wanting breakfast because the goddamned hippo had eaten everything.
Pets suck.
This letter will be a little short. I found that gross red hippo-smear all over my car. I think that the hippo has been trying to mate with my car. Maybe it’s the long eyelashes. They’re roughly the same size and shape. Anyway, I have to go turn the pressure washer on that damned hippo, otherwise I’m going to have little Mini-hippo hybrids wandering around.
Gross.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
Daddy and I have been gone over the weekend to see your grandmother. The hippo hates it when we’re out of town. It doesn’t matter how much hay we put out, how many piles of glistening green lettuces and waxy cabbage. When we get back, there’s always shit everywhere, uneaten cabbages floating in the creek (the stink is pretty impressive), and a hippo in the creek, yawning threateningly in our direction. I’m thinking hard about taking him back to the hippo pound. The problem is that, while they were okay with bringing him on a flatbed truck to our place, getting him there is our responsibility. He can’t hop up into the truck bed, and we’d have to cut him up into at least six pieces to fit him into my car, one piece at a time. The other scenario is that I tie him to the top of my car, but I’m pretty sure his feet would touch the ground on either side, so he’d pretty much have to walk us to the hippo pound.
Calvin’s doing okay, though.
Okay, I have to jet. Horrifying, child-frightening fiction doesn’t write itself.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
I talked to the hippo removal guy. Yes, there’s a hippo removal guy. When I called him up, it sounded on the phone like the kind of fat guy who’s always got the butt of a slimy cigar screwed into the corner of his mouth, but when I met him in person, he was this really skinny guy about my height with waist-length dreadlocks. Weird, right? So he looks at the hippo, and at the rotting cabages floating in the creek, and the completely bare hillside, and at the horses at the neighbor’s place which are clearly visible now because the damn hippo knocked down FOUR trees (did I mention that the bastard will body check trees until they fall down?). And he basically said “Shame you can’t keep him. This is a pretty sweet setup.”
While I agree entirely, I realize that I’m not the kind of laid-back, it’s-all-groovy, granola-hugging, all-God’s-creatures-are-beautiful kind of person. I’m a “don’t charge at my car when I drive home at night you stupid hippo” kind of person. I’m a “I don’t really appreciate having my house stuccoed in shit” person. Call me crazy.
So Mr. Hippo Removal (he told me his name and it’s something like Ray or Dave, something with a long A sound in it) looked at how big the hippo is (apparently, he’s grown just since he got here so now he’s fat even for a hippo) and says that he’s got a crate and flatbed truck and can have him out of here in a week. You know what that means? Another week with this goddamned hippo.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
The hippo is officially gone, although it’s going to take some time to clean all the rotting cabbage out of the creek, scrape the shit off the house, the truck, the walkway, etc., and generally recover from having a discontented hippo living here. But I’m still kind of sad, so I decided to hold a sort of funeral. Not for the hippo itself, which is going to live at a luxury hippo sanctuary in Idaho, but for the idea of hippo ownership, which is dead, dead, dead.
So I invited some friends over, including the handyman, all my writing group, a bunch of neighbors, etc. My friends were all really understanding about my grief and everyone showed up with some kind of token of loss. One friend came all the way from Minnesota and read a poem about how the hippo was a symbol of feminine rage. Another wrote a horror story where the victims of the hippo reanimate and rise out of the creek seeking revenge (which was a gruesome thought until you realize that his “victims” were mostly vegetables which aren’t threatening even when alive). The handyman constructed a nice coffin, which we set adrift on the creek. Except that it’s really warm out, and the creek is really low, and it went about ten yards before hitting a big rock and just sticking there. Everyone stared at it for a bit, and the silence was a little awkward. Daddy played the bagpipes. Then we all went inside and had a buffet of coleslaw, salad and bok choy, because we had shitloads of leftovers to get rid of.
Maybe I’d have liked him better if I’d named him.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
Well, it’s just past 1:30am, but since Daddy is in Sacramento at a bagpipe competition and your sister is at a friend’s house, I’m still up. I’ve cleaned the kitchen, watered the outside plants, and mopped a metric ton of dog puke off my office floor. Seriously, I don’t know what the hell the dog ate, but it seems like she got into my office and took a couple of steps, puked, took a couple more steps, puked. I’ve had two children and done daycare for a dozen more and I’ve never seen such a volume of vomit as I’ve seen from that 12-pound dog.
I’m gonna go take a shower now. I’m kind of scuzzy. Although I’m just going to get up and wash my car, which is seriously gross. You know how my car gets. I scraped off most of the hippo shit, but you can only get so much of it off without actually pressure washing it. The creek is going to take a while to recover from the hippo as well. Although Calvin the giraffe isn’t helping. You would be surprised by just how much a giraffe shits.
I was.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
Ever since the hippopotamus left, it’s been really sad. I friended the hippopotamus-hauler guy on Facebook, and he’s been posting pictures of our hippopotamus at a sanctuary in Idaho. There are pictures with Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and a bunch of other old guy celebrities who all need to pose with wild animals to prove that they’re still hot. The hippopotamus doesn’t look any more impressed with them than it did with us. I would like to think it was happy living in our creek, but I must say that I’m just as happy to have it stucco-ing someone else’s house with shit.
Love, Mom
Dear Pansy,
I want to get a monkey. One of those cute little capuchin monkeys. Calvin the giraffe is pining for company.
There’s a company called Helping Hands that trains monkeys to help people with spinal cord injuries. I wonder if I could fake an injury and get a monkey helper. And is it unethical to train a monkey to mix drinks? I think I could totally train a monkey to make lemon twists. I would make the monkey a little bed above my bed, and I would train the monkey to wake up when my alarm went off and go and make tea, and then come and bring me the tea and gently wake me up by picking out my clothes and laying them on the bed. Maybe I can also get it to do things like answer my emails and stuff.
Love, Mom
I Love You But Fuck Off 