Listen to me, there are two hippopotamuses standing in a river, such a filthy dirty river, it is horrible, it is simply horrible, and the sun, my God, you would not believe it, you just would not believe it, what with the heat and the sun and with how sticky and humid and muggy it is, it is stifling, it is absolutely unbelievable how stifling, it is positively beyond all believability, a day so stifling like this, a day which could kill you like this, a day which could do away with you with just one hour, one minute, one breath, but meanwhile all day long, from when the sun comes up in the morning to when the sun is starting to go down at night, all day long the two hippopotamuses are standing there in the scorching water like that, they are up to their ears and their eyeballs in the scorching torpid water like that, and it is filthy dirty hot disgusting water like that, not either one of them moving a single muscle in it, the two of them not budging, not even one inch, not even leaning a fraction of an inch in this direction or in that direction, except for maybe if you want to count these little tiny twitches of the eyelids, of the ears, these little tiny tremors you would probably call them, these little trembles and twitches, but otherwise the two hippopotamuses are like granite, like stone, standing there in the disgusting water from first thing in the morning to the time when it is almost sundown already, all day long the two of them all covered up by the filthy hot torpid water like that except for just where their little ears are sticking up out of it and constantly twitching little twitches and their big bulgy eyes are poking up a little bit out of the water and the eyelids, you can see that the eyelids are giving these little bitty trembles, these tiny little tremors, these little tiny tremblings, maybe from flies probably or maybe from little nits or something even tinier than that, or it could be from some kind of teensy almost invisible things which like to creep around on the eyelids of hippopotamuses…
— Gordon Lish (from “Can you top this?”)
