The morning sun cast long shadows across the Antarctic ice as Pengo made his way to the fishing grounds. His tiny flippers left tracks that were noticeably smaller than those of the other penguins, a fact that had never gone unnoticed by his colony mates. At barely half the size of a normal Emperor penguin, Pengo had always stood outâand not in the way anyone would want to.
"Look who it is," came a familiar mocking voice. "Little Pengo, finally brave enough to join the morning hunt?" The speaker was Maximus, one of the largest penguins in the colony. He stood nearly twice Pengo's height, his sleek feathers rippling in the wind as he waddled forward with an exaggerated swagger.
Pengo kept his head down, trying to edge around the gathering crowd. But as always, they formed a circle around him, their jeers and laughter echoing across the ice field.
"Did your mother forget to feed you fish when you were a chick?" another penguin called out. "Or were you just born wrong?"
"Maybe he's actually a different species," someone else chimed in. "A Little Blue penguin that got lost and wandered into the wrong colony!"
Pengo felt his chest tighten, but he'd learned long ago that responding only made things worse. Instead, he focused on the ocean ahead. He needed to catch fishânot just for himself, but to prove he could contribute to the colony like any other penguin.
"Going fishing, are you?" Maximus stepped directly into his path. "You can barely reach the shallow waters with those tiny flippers. The deep waters where the real fish swim? They'd swallow you whole!"
The truth was, Pengo had taught himself to dive deeper than any of them knew. Being small had its advantagesâhe could slip through narrow gaps in the ice, find passages others couldn't. But none of them had ever bothered to watch him fish. They were too busy laughing at his attempts to even enter the water.
"The Great Gathering is coming up soon," a female penguin named Crystal pointed out, her voice dripping with mock concern. "Poor Little Pengo, do you think you'll find any rocks small enough for your tiny flippers to carry?"
The Great Gathering. Pengo's heart sank at the mention of it. The annual event where penguins of age would present their rock collections to potential mates. He'd been gathering rocks in secret for months now, storing them in a hidden cove far from the colony's usual grounds. Each dive for rocks was a challenge, but he'd persevered, determined to build a collection that would make even Maximus's look modest.
"He probably thinks Aria will choose him," someone snickered, and Pengo felt his face grow hot under his feathers. He hadn't told anyone about his feelings for her, but in a colony this size, secrets rarely stayed secret for long.
Aria was everything Pengo wasn'tâgraceful, perfectly proportioned, admired by all. She lived at the heart of the colony's social life, while Pengo scratched out an existence on its fringes. Sometimes, when no one was watching, she would give him a look that seemed almost kind. Those moments, brief as they were, had given him hope.
"Aria?" Maximus threw back his head and laughed. "Little Pengo, you'd have better luck trying to mate with a seal! At least they might not notice how runty you are under all that blubber!"
The colony erupted in laughter. Pengo felt each guffaw like a physical blow, but he kept his beak shut tight. His father's last words to him before being taken by a leopard seal echoed in his mind: "Size isn't everything, son. It's what you do with what you have that matters."
Finally, the morning fishing groups began to form, and his tormentors lost interest. As they waddled away, Pengo could hear them still chuckling about him. "Little Pengo," they called him, and he supposed that's all he'd ever be to them.
But they didn't know about his secret rock collection, growing larger by the day. They didn't know how he'd learned to use the currents to dive deeper than any of them, how he'd mapped out every underwater cave and crevice within swimming distance. They didn't know that every mockery, every jeer, every cruel laugh only strengthened his resolve.
As he watched the fishing groups disappear into the distance, Pengo turned toward his secret cove. The Great Gathering was approaching, and he had more rocks to collect. Maybe he couldn't change his size, but he could show them all that a little penguin could dream big.
What he didn't know thenâwhat none of them knewâwas that among those carefully gathered rocks lay one that would change everything. But that was still to come. For now, Pengo was just a small penguin with a big heart, preparing for the day he hoped would finally make the colony see him as more than just Little Pengo.