Fiction and Drama

Angelo Hernandez Sias

For the penguins it was just a day

Thomas Mukarobgwa, When you live very good in the world you will be taken up to heaven when you die . 1963, oil on board, 36 1/5 x 30". Courtesy of private collection.

J ulio (Columbia ’20, English), in the winter of his final year of college, flew to Cape Town to Unmask Historical Legacies. Now, instead of Unmasking Historical Legacies, or as a means thereof, he was at a beach, swimming with a colony of penguins. He was swimming, rather, in the vicinity of a colony, the penguins having absconded to an inaccessible stretch, perhaps unappeased by the colony’s relative health — two thousand since a pair was planted in 1980, the flyer boasted — and aware that, thanks to humans, a measly 10 percent were left of the 1.5 million estimated to have populated the continent in 1910.…