A trip to Panama

story for writer's cramp 515 words

515 words:

I was never a very diligent student. I finished high school and went on to become an electrician. Good technicians are rare, thus I have been quite successful. Last month I decided to take a vacation and flew to Panama. In the airplane a pretty nerd was sitting next to me. She had notes and a laptop in front of her and she was lost in reading, that is until the turbulences started. She turned gray and quickly put everything in her bag. She then made sure that her seat belt was fastened and gripped the side rests.

I engaged her in conversation to make her forget her fright.

“I am a biologist specializing in xenarthran mammals,” she told me.

“This sounds like something out of a movie with aliens,” I remarked.

“Sloths,” she added.

“This sounds like a sin,” I said and she looked at me aggravated.

“Animals, sloths are animals, I study the Choloepus,” she explained.

I nodded, more interested in her bust than in her work.

I must have said something right following the awkward beginning of our chat, because upon arrival in Panama I was able to join her at her hotel and spent an interesting night in her bed. The next morning, she thought it would be a good idea for me to join her in her site visit.
That’s how I encountered my first sloth. She kept talking the whole time, using words like Neotropical group and arboreal tree sloths. I couldn’t really care if the specimen before me had two or three toes, apparently the ones in Panama have only two. Since she allowed me to keep groping her while we trekked through the forest, I was happy to listen to her describe her work in detail.

After several hours of watching the sloths hanging upside down, I decided that I envied them their slowness. They looked perfectly content doing nothing. I thought that one of them must have felt sorry for me who had spent a whole morning walking through the forest just to see him and the others do nothing.

I even took a photo of me with one of them in the background as a memento from the vacation which I spent trekking through the forest in search for sloths instead of swimming in the pool of a posh hotel.

I shouldn’t complain though, because my guide let me have my way with her, right there in the forest while we watched one of the sloths. In that instance I learnt that moans do not disturb the specific animals, which were completely indifferent to my passionate partner burning in ecstasy.

These days, my photo with the sloth is pinned by a magnet on my fridge. When my friends ask me about it, I tell them that I have a weakness for sloths, which is quite true. After all the feisty biologist will present her work in a conference in my city next month and I have promised to show her around, even if I plan to spend most of the time in bed with her.