Wallace the Penguin Starts to Lose it
Wallace the penguin lived in the Cold Coast Exhibit at the city zoo. On the surface, everything looked fine. The pool was always clean, the zookeepers were kind, and the kids pressed their sticky faces to the glass like clockwork.
But deep inside, Wallace was unraveling.
See, penguins in the wild swim miles a day, dive for fish, dodge leopard seals, and gossip with each other in what scientists call “chaotic waddling.”
Wallace did none of this.
He circled the same fiberglass rock every day, again and again and again, until he started naming the cracks in it.
“Good morning, Geraldine,” he whispered to a dent near the bottom. “You’re looking especially cracky today.”
One morning, he stood in front of his favorite drain grate for ten straight hours, convinced it was trying to tell him a secret. By noon, he’d decided the bubbles in the pool spelled out Morse code, and by dinnertime, he was pretty sure the zoo’s intercom was just a government cover-up to hide the truth about Antarctica.
He started speaking only in squawks that sounded philosophical:
“Squaaaaawk.” (Translation: What is freedom but the illusion of ice?)
Eventually, the zookeepers noticed Wallace was spending most of his day staring into corners and dramatically sighing.
They brought in an animal behaviorist.
“Well,” the specialist said, “he’s either having a spiritual awakening or a full-blown existential crisis.”
They gave him enrichment toys. He stared at a rubber fish for an hour, then tried to marry it.
They brought him a penguin friend. Wallace declared himself “King of the Exhibit” and exiled the new guy to the far end of the pool for “disrespecting the order of the drain spirits.”
At this point, Wallace became something of a legend. Visitors came just to watch him solemnly bow to light fixtures and perform nightly “rituals” with pebbles and lettuce.
“He’s… going through something,” one keeper muttered.
But maybe, in his own cracked way, Wallace had figured it out. Maybe the madness was the escape. If he couldn’t leave the zoo, he’d create his own world inside it.
A world with rules.
And secrets.
And Geraldine the crack.
