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(continued)
It took her a moment, in her discombobulated state, to realize what had happened. Her front feet were squelched thickly in the mud below the glass window. Her back feet were sticking straight up, and her belly was pressed against the glass. By the time she had understood where she was, a sea full of zoogoers were snapping photos of the upside-down hippo, pointing, and guffawing loudly at her expense. For a moment, she caught the mournful eye of a quiet little creature, and though she could no longer bear a moment more of this disgrace, she found herself completely unable to dislodge her feet. Even the mud betrayed her.
It felt like hours before Jules brought the other zookeepers – the newshound and the soap-watcher – to rescue Marmalade from her precarious position, tilting her right-side-up out of the mud like a lever. Floating back to the surface, Marmalade gasped for breath. She turned away from the cackling crowd, only to face the uncommonly direct glares from the entire hippo community, which turned their collective tail on her before she had a chance to do so herself. She had no choice but to float to the side of the pool by the zookeeper station. Miserably, she curled up (as much as a hippo can curl) by the edge, nudged a scratch on her foot, and sighed.
Through the window at the station, Marmalade could see a dripping-wet Jules toweling her hair. Jules sat back down at the television box and switched on the black-and-white channel once more. There, again, were the elegant rows of swimmers, swerving through the water and making great, swan-like leaps from the edge of their pool.
This was too much for Marmalade. She pulled herself out of the water once more, and, this time, trudged out farther than she ever had trudged before. She trudged along the pathway until the pathway ended and she was crossing untread grass. She took step after careful step until she came to a halt at the Great Hippo Crevasse. It was an impasse, she knew. No hippo she knew had ever come even this far. She laid down to rest until the twilight washed her crackled skin and the daytime smell of orange blossoms gave way to the nighttime waft of jasmine. And then, with nowhere else to go, and nothing to go on except the inspiration from the gentle smile of the moon, she plucked up her courage… and she leaped.
None of the hippos at the pool ever heard from Marmalade again. But then, never straying from their hopscotch formation, they would never have chanced to watch one of Jules’ fancy black-and-white movies through the window of the observation station. They never would have known whether or not she had made it across the crevasse, let alone across the county all the way to the pools and waterfalls of Hollywood, where anyone with a dream and the courage to leap toward it – even a hippo – can become a star.
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