Tyler the Hippo in Majorca

Tyler the Hippo in Majorca

I was half drunk on vermouth and sunlight when I stumbled through the backroads of Majorca, that sun-burnt stretch of Spanish coastline the guidebooks never bother to Majorca. The cliffs there feel older than the gods, white chalk breaking against the sea, and it was in that crumbling amphitheater that I found him. Tyler the Hippo.

Not a myth. Not a hallucination. A living beast wading through the shallows like he owned the entire Mediterranean. He moved with the kind of slow violence that makes every other animal step aside. The locals said the water was cursed, but what they meant was that it was claimed.

I didn’t come to Majorca alone. My girlfriend’s the reason I’m even here the hot one with the sharp grin and sharper ambitions. She’s tucked away at grad school in Spain, drowning in books while I’m drowning in vermouth and dust-choked alleyways. She says she’s chasing knowledge, a master’s degree stamped with old European ink. I tell her I’m chasing the myths she doesn’t have time for.

That’s how I found Tyler the Hippo. In a pottery shop that smelled of wet clay and ghost hands, sitting there on a shelf like Swayze had spun him up between kisses. A fat, smiling little carving, too alive for fired earth. The kind of thing that makes you stop and reconsider what’s real.

I pulled on my Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and let them lock him in. Every glaze, every fingerprint pressed into clay, captured. She laughed when I showed her later, said only I would turn her grad school city into a safari for ceramic animals. But she looked at the hippo longer than she meant to. That’s how I know Tyler got to her too.

She’ll graduate. She’ll walk across some marble floor in Madrid or Barcelona and wear a robe that costs more than my first car. But long after the tassel’s turned, she’ll remember this ridiculous little hippo, and the day her boyfriend swore he found something holy in a back alley pottery shop.

That’s love in Spain she gets the books, I get the ghosts, and somewhere in the middle sits Tyler the Hippo, smiling at both of us.

I left him there at dusk, shadows swallowing his bulk as the sea pulled him back. On the walk home, I thought about those sunglasses. How they’re just glass and wire to some, but armor to the rest of us. You can call it product placement if you want. I call it survival.