The Opera

One day there were penguins in the streets. We had just got about two feet of fresh snow. The coal barge showed up empty, which was nothing new, and some of us decided to have a good old-fashioned rave up at the Opera.

So we woke the gang, and since there was no coal to shovel, we carried radiators down to the opera house. We ripped up the seats and burned them in trash cans. Someone found the costumes backstage and we dressed as women and sang “Kill Da Wabbit.”

The penguins came in through the rear exits. With so many people we didn’t notice until they got right next to us. They had a stereo with batteries. This made them instantly popular. We put on Spaceman Joe and taught them how to pick up champagne glasses with their beaks.

After half an hour or so, someone got the idea to play the tape recorder. It was some Englishmen complaining about how they had awful jobs down a hole someplace. Lucky to have jobs of any sort, we said, and put Joe back on, please.

This was the wrong thing to say as far as penguins were concerned. They started squeaking and hissing, snapping and lunging at us. Then they took their stereo back and left. We all got tough after that, daring any penguins to come in this opera house again and such.

As we got drunker the penguins’ offense grew ranker, and we resolved to stand our ground at the next altercation. Who were they, we demanded, throwing another pillow on the fire, to come into our party and tell us what sounds better on the stereo?

This was not some iceberg in the South Sea. We made torches, dousing rags in radiator moonshine. This was our turf, and if they wanted to live here, they better make like pigeons and get out of our way. We exploded from the backstage fire exit, belting some loony tune.

It was a balcony two stories high. A seething black caterpillar of penguins roiled up the street. People had been dragged into the mass and kept their footing only by following the current. We stood there in our dresses and shivered.

Joshua William Booth’s stories and poems have been published in magazines like The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Opium Magazine, The Duck & Herring Pocket Field Guide, Brittle Star, Edifice Wrecked, and Quarto. “The Opera” is a chapter from a not yet published novel, The Nightmares of Penguins.