Baby Penguin's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Inside the clinic, the air was warm and smelled like soap. Valerie set Baby Penguin on a soft towel on the counter and looked at it for a long moment. "You need cold," she said. "Cold is south." She said it like she was working it out for herself. Baby Penguin did not know south. Baby Penguin knew the tundra, and the tundra was where its parents were, and the tundra was not through the door it had come in. Valerie went to a drawer and came back with a folded paper. She spread it flat on the counter. It was a map, drawn by hand in dark ink, with a swamp and a road and a wobbly line of coast. She tapped a corner. "Clinic." She dragged her finger down the paper, past the swamp, past the coast, all the way to the bottom edge. "South Pole. Where you live. Where the others are." Baby Penguin looked at her finger, then at the door, then back at her finger. Its short flippers pressed the towel. "You can't walk it," Valerie said. "Not today. Not alone." She paused. She looked at the door too. Then she picked Baby Penguin up under the flippers and carried it to the window at the back of the clinic. She pointed past the flower boxes, past the path, at the low sun. "That is west. Turn your back to it. That way is south. When you leave, you go that way. Only that way. Don't switch." Baby Penguin stared at the sun until its eyes watered. It turned its back. The direction behind it felt like nothing yet. But now it had a name. Valerie set Baby Penguin down and crouched to its level. "You stay tonight," she said. "I feed you. In the morning I find someone going your way." She stood and went to write something on a clipboard, then stopped with the pen above the paper. She did not write. She put the clipboard face down on the counter. Baby Penguin watched her, and understood only that she had chosen not to do a thing she had meant to do. It was warm. It was fed soon after, small pink fish from a tin. Baby Penguin ate them and wanted another. Outside, the sun dropped behind the trees, and the way home was a straight line at Baby Penguin's back, held there by a word it had just learned. Tomorrow, it would walk.