Penguin Facts by Jennifer Todhunter
Associate Editor Dacia Price on today’s bonus story: In Jennifer Todhunter’s “Penguin Facts,” questions relating to penguins lend a levity to an otherwise dire narrative of violence, love, and longing. And yet it’s in these moments of questioning when the prose is most tender, most revealing, most poignant. This is a piece that continues to unfurl, demanding to be read over and over again.
Penguin Facts
Content warning: domestic abuse
When his fist finally hit my face instead of the drywall, I climbed into our car, the one I'd never driven before, and drove with my dog and my daughter to the ocean. The ocean ran the length of the coast all the way to Chile where five different species of penguins lived, my favourite being the rockhopper, with its old-man eyebrow hair and mohawk-type buzz, but my dog and my daughter and I, we did not drive that far, because I wasn't a confident driver or mother or anything for that matter, and Chile would have been next-level, something to work up to.
I wore a red and white striped dress for the occasion, sat on a log washed up by the ocean and cried. My daughter lay like seaweed in my arms. My dog licked the breeze-blown salt from my shins and swam lengths through the winter ocean. Craggy coast to craggy coast. Pussy willows and dead heads. Nothing good ever happens in winter, I told my dog, but she didn't move as she was already asleep, just like my daughter.
When my husband and I first met, I had one tattoo and that tattoo was of a penguin. Did you know, I said on our first date, did you know the male penguin looks after the egg until it hatches?
I'd look after your eggs, he said, and that was how our daughter occurred.
***
When his fist finally hit my face instead of his pillow, he cried and I did not.
I had been expecting it. The hit, not the crying.
He'd murdered at least a dozen pillows beforehand and left them at the curb on garbage day, patched fist-punched wall-holes around our house with drawings I'd sketched on maternity leave, with plaster he'd mixed with water using my good measuring cup, and then, with nothing because at that point we rarely had people over and what did it matter if the holes were covered anyway.
We’d stay up extra-late watching nature documentaries. He’d stay up to drink beer and I’d stay up because I'd get in shit for going to bed without him and David Attenborough's voice would soothe me and inevitably I'd fall asleep and my husband would wake me wanting to fuck. Fuck or fist through the drywall.
Did you know, I said on our first date, did you know the female penguin chooses her mate?
***
When his fist finally hit my face instead of the steering wheel, I was ready. The driving instructor thought I was ready too. My daughter sat in her carseat facing backwards, playing with her barefoot-toes. My dog sat shotgun, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. I crept through intersection after intersection until we collided with the open road.
The landscape changed the closer I got to the coast. No more meadows or cattle or lodgepole pine. Every corner encouraged me to drive further, to depress the accelerator a little longer. When the ocean appeared through my windshield, I took a moment to consider the distance to Cape Horn, Chile, the almost thirteen-thousand kilometres separating me from the penguins.
Did you know, I said on our first date, did you know that penguins spend seventy-five percent of their lives in the water?
Jennifer Todhunter's stories have appeared in The Forge, River Teeth, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Wigleaf´s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.
