The Hippouroboros
Once upon a time, a special baby hippo was born, who almost immediately had to fight a territorial toddler much larger than itself, whose fierceness had finished off many a newborn before. Despite being only a few moments old and of a significantly smaller size, the fully-formed infant somehow managed to open its mouth wider than its opponent and bite its head clean off. Over time, as it continued to grow past adolescence and into adulthood, it defeated all rivals, big and small. Unable to be bested by anyone, it eventually grew bored and decided to attempt to best itself.
With eyes rolled back in its head, the hippo began to emit a low, numinous noise, as its uncanny mouth started to supernaturally expand. As far as they could go, its jaws continued to extend, but boundless, they just kept going, until it wrapped clean around its own body, reverse swallowing itself. Not content with just this feat, it spat out itself and set its sights upon the surroundings.
Emanating a deeper than deep, rumbling hum that resounded like a bell ringing “Boioioioinnnggg...”, the hippo’s mouth began to envelop the entire river’s surface, then the land and whole region itself, with its little feet and body raised cartoonishly up in the air, and its face pointed netherly above the ground. As its jaws kept outspreading, the hippo, in due time, downed the entire countryside, then the continents and oceans, and then the planet itself, but, still dissatisfied, chose to keep on going. Before long, it swallowed Venus and Mercury too, which served only as appetizer hors d’oeuvres for the main meal of the Sun itself. Once gobbled up and gulped down, the hippo set its sights on the star Altair of the constellation Aquila, then the dog star Sirius of the constellation Canis Major, which just so happened to be in the direction of the galactic bulge from Earth at that time, with the supermassive black hole in its center.
Having thusly consumed most of the galaxy, including many supergiant stars along the way, the hippo continued onwards, still discontented, towards the rest of the universe, multiverse, and all possible dimensions, even ones outside of time and space that, technically speaking, could not actually be wolfed down. But somehow, it kept guzzling infinitely from where it started, defying all physical and metaphysical constraints, until almost every frequency and vibration filled its belly, including colors and senses unseen, as well as ways of being outside of ways of being. In some way or another, the river horse just kept going until it somehow began to reach the other side of itself, swallowing everything from Sedna to Mars, including the Kuiper belt, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter. As it reached the limitless limits of infinity in the form of its short stub of a tail, the hippo felt something gurgling in its growly belly, and finally felt the rest of its violently vibrating body beginning to reach a limit. Extending in total exertion in an effort to clamp down on the tiny tip of tail, the spectacular sounds between its mandible and maxilla at last became too much to contain. With its little hind legs dangling above its now interminably open mouth preparing to bite down, it irrepressibly let out more flatulence than any living creature ever, which contained within it all of creation and beyond, both manifested and unmanifested, which, due to its awkward positioning, it automatically scarfed back down.
From its still extant instinct, the hippo, spinning its tail, flung around in circles everything expelled, setting into motion the same orbits that had originally birthed it. Still shaking ferociously from the pressures thus exerted, its epidermis, along with the rest of its body, began to undulate and unfurl from the inside out, approaching the speed of sound then light then thought then no thought, so to turn inside out of inside out of outside in indefinitely. Through sheer paradox, the magical, irrational hippouroboros surpassed the infinite finiteness of infinity, where its perpetually unraveling body gradually became again all it had eaten, into which it ultimately dissolved, having finally met its match in the form of itself.
