Penny Penguin's Wobbly Tooth

• Chapter 1 The Morning Nibble
• Chapter 2 A Strange Little Wiggle
• Chapter 3 Mirror on the Ice
• Chapter 4 Barnaby Bear’s Advice
• Chapter 5 The Crunchy Krill Dilemma
• Chapter 6 Hiding the Secret
• Chapter 7 Pippa’s Big Smile
• Chapter 8 Whispers at Pebble School
• Chapter 9 The Tongue Trick
• Chapter 10 Slippery Slope Worries
• Chapter 11 Dr. Flipper’s Checkup
• Chapter 12 Stories of the Tooth Walrus
• Chapter 13 The Extra Wobbly Tuesday
• Chapter 14 Cold Snowcone Comfort
• Chapter 15 A Twist and a Turn
• Chapter 16 Fear of the Gap
• Chapter 17 Grandma Peng’s Keepsake Box
• Chapter 18 Brave Little Steps
• Chapter 19 The Great Ice Skating Plunge
• Chapter 20 Plink! Into the Snow
• Chapter 21 The Search for the Lost Tooth
• Chapter 22 Finding the Tiny Treasure
• Chapter 23 The Empty Space Feels Funny
• Chapter 24 Under the Ice Pillow
• Chapter 25 A Morning Surprise
• Chapter 26 Room for Something Brand New

The morning sun over Shiver Point did not rise so much as it cracked through the mist like a pale yolk spreading across blue enamel. For Penny Penguin, the day began with the familiar scratch of down feathers against frosted quilt fabric and the low, musical whistle of the sea wind testing the chinks in the igloo door. Outside, the Southern Ocean sloshed heavily against the pack ice, sloshing with the steady, dull rhythm of a great wet broom sweeping a kitchen floor. It was a Tuesday, which meant nothing exceptional in the grand scheme of the colony, but Tuesday always carried the specific smell of salted cedar shavings from the smoking huts near the cove.

Penny stretched her left flipper, then her right, extending each until the tips touched the cool, curved wall beside her nest. Her bed was a modest basin hollowed into compacted snow, lined meticulously with dry sea-grass, lichen flakes, and three very smooth, pale gray pebbles she had gathered two summers ago near the tide pools. The stones held the warmth of her belly feathers long after she shifted away from them. She blinked at the round ceiling where a stray icicle hung like an upside-down radish, dripping once every twenty seconds onto a polished stone below. Tick. Tick. Tick. It was the only clock the family owned, and it was rarely wrong when the weather held clear.

From the central corridor came the scrape of iron on slate. That was her mother, Martha, clearing out the night’s soot from the fire-pit. Shortly after came the pungent, rich steam of breakfast, which had a way of curling around corners and poking sleeping fledglings directly in the beak. Penny sniffed. It was dried herring loaf, lightly warmed, paired with the crisp, pickled kelp ribbons her father insisted kept their feathers waterproof during the colder transitions of the season.

She rolled onto her white belly, pushed herself up with a low grunt, and shook her tail. A loose puff of gray chick-fuzz drifted toward the rug—one of the very last remnants of her baby coat. Most of her feathers were sleek now, dark as wet slate along her back and clean as fresh snow across her front, but she still felt entirely too small whenever she stood beside the adult birds on the bluff. Her webbed feet made a dull slap-tap, slap-tap on the packed ice floor as she waddled into the dining nook.

"Mind the threshold, Penny," Martha said without looking up from the stone griddle. She was a round, sensible penguin with eyes like black peppercorns and a yellow streak behind her ears that curved sharply like lightning bolts. She wielded a flat bone spatula with the calm authority of someone who had turned twenty thousand fish loaves and intended to turn twenty thousand more. "The thaw came through the bottom seam again last night. It will take an hour for the salt to set."

"Morning, Mama," Penny murmured. She hopped onto her three-legged stool, which had been carved from drift-pine by her uncle Barnaby. The wood was cold through her tail feathers, but it had a comforting, sturdy weight that didn't tilt even when she shifted restlessly.

Across the low stone table sat her father, Percy, obscured behind the double-folded pages of the Shiver Point Gazette. The paper was damp, as it always was on days with heavy maritime fog, and the gray ink smelled faintly of squid bile. From behind the front page, where a headline blared something about krill quotas and an iceberg drifting dangerously close to the western nursery grounds, came an occasional hum of approval or a sharp snap of his bill.

"Wind’s out of the northwest," Percy observed to the room at large, the paper trembling slightly as he adjusted his grip. "We’ll have slush along the shelf before midday. The school skiff will have to take the inner channel if old Captain Gull intends to get the youngsters home dry."

"Then she’d better take her extra muffler," Martha said, setting a broad, shallow stone platter in the middle of the table. "Eat, Penny. Don't stare at the grease."

Penny looked down at her portion. On her chipped earthenware plate lay a wedge of dried herring loaf, brown and firm, alongside two curled strips of brine-cured sea cabbage. It looked ordinary. It smelled ordinary. It was the very same meal she had eaten every morning since her beak had hardened enough to handle solid crusts. She picked up her small bone fork, though penguins generally preferred their bills for the heavy work, and cut a small square from the corner of the loaf.

"Chew properly today," Percy remarked from behind the sports section. "Yesterday you bolted your sprats like you were being chased by a leopard seal. Your mother said you had the hiccoughs all through the afternoon arithmetic lecture."

"I was in a hurry because the tide was going out," Penny said defensively, her voice slightly muffled as she lifted the fork to her beak. "The slide was fast yesterday. If you don't get there before the third bell, the bigger fledglings scrape all the soft frost off the track and leave nothing but blue ice."

"Blue ice builds character," her father muttered, turning a page with a sharp crack of newsprint. "Builds thicker skin on the shins, too. In my year, we didn't have snow banked on the curves. If you took the turn wide, you ended up in the kelp drift, and you spent half the morning untangling your toes before the spelling bee."

Penny didn't answer. She took the first bite.

The dried loaf was crusty on the outside, having spent just enough time against the smoking stones to form a tough, leathery rim that required a solid snap of the jaws to divide. Penny bit down firmly with the right side of her bill, expecting the customary dry crunch and the savory rush of cold oil.

Instead, there was an odd, unexpected sensation. It wasn't pain, precisely, but rather a sudden, microscopic jolt of give. It felt like stepping onto an ice sheet that looked solid but was actually hollow underneath—a tiny, secret sinking that made her stomach drop before her brain could name the reason.

She paused, her bill clamped halfway through the smoked skin. Her jaw felt slightly off-center, as though a hinge had loosened by half a thread.

"What's the matter?" Martha asked, pausing with the tea-kettle suspended over an earthenware mug. A thin column of steam curled up between them, carrying the bitter, clean aroma of steeped rock-moss. "Is it too salty? The merchant from the North Shelf swore this salt was scraped from the clean drift, but I told him it looked grayish."

"No," Penny said quickly, not opening her beak all the way. She carefully completed the bite, but she did it slowly, shifting the work toward the left side of her mouth. The small square of herring loaf broke free, yet as she worked it around with her tongue, a foreign, peculiar stiffness remained behind.

She didn't swallow immediately. Instead, she let the fish sit on her tongue while she tentatively touched the small, pointed serration on the lower edge of her bill—the little calcified tip that she used for holding onto wriggling shrimp and puncturing tough weed. It was tiny, no bigger than the seed of an arctic poppy, but to Penny, it had always been as solid and permanent as the basalt cliffs beneath their igloo.

Now, under the cautious pressure of her rough tongue, it didn't feel like basalt at all.

It felt like a fence picket when the ground begins to thaw in spring. It felt like a loose pebble in an otherwise smooth pathway. When her tongue pressed upward and slightly out, the tiny point seemed to tilt. Just a fraction of a millimeter. Just enough to produce a bizarre, ticklish pressure deep in the fleshy pink lining where the bill met the jawbone.

Penny froze. She held her breath until her ribs felt tight under her down.

"Penny?" Martha’s voice had that particular maternal edge that warned against dawdling. "The bell will sound from the bluff in twenty minutes. If you’re late again, Mr. Clearwater will have you scraping lime off the recitation slates during the midday swim."

"I'm eating," Penny squeaked. She swallowed the bite of loaf almost whole, barely noticing the salty grease as it slipped down her throat.

Her heart had begun to hammer against her breastbone like a trapped gull. She stared down at the remaining half of the fish wedge on her plate. It looked enormous now, tough and unyielding, like a chunk of dried driftwood. How could she possibly bite through the rest of it without feeling that terrible, unstable give again? The sensation had made her skin prickle beneath her feathers, as if cold sea spray had suddenly been blown down her collar.

She tried a strip of the kelp instead, hoping it would be more forgiving. The kelp was slick and rubbery. She placed it between her teeth on the left side, keeping her tongue rigidly parked against the roof of her mouth so it wouldn't accidentally touch the strange spot on the right. She chewed with exaggerated care, moving her jaw straight up and down like a mechanical toy.

Percy lowered his paper just enough for his round, dark eyes to peer over the top fold. He looked at her through his thick spectacles, which were perpetually fogged at the corners from his morning tea.

"You're chewing like an old walrus with gravel in its gizzard," he observed plainly. "Is there sand in the loaf, Martha?"

"There is no sand in the loaf," Martha said, setting the skillet down on the hearth with a decisive clatter. "I washed the meal twice in the freshwater bucket. If there is sand, the grocer will hear about it before the market closes."

"No sand," Penny managed, her beak barely parting. "Just... chewing."

"Well, chew faster," her father said, disappearing once more behind an editorial concerning the local lighthouse oil supply. "The colony doesn't run on daydreams. Time and tide wait for no bird, especially not fledglings who need twelve minutes to finish an inch of cold fish."

Penny took another tiny, miserable nibble of the kelp. With every movement of her lower jaw, she was dreadfully aware of the little point. It sat there like an uninvited guest, slightly out of line with its neighbors. She could feel it even when she wasn't touching it. It seemed to thrum with a dull, strange life of its own, reminding her with every breath that something inside her mouth, something that had always been completely fixed and reliable, had suddenly lost its moorings.

She looked across at the small ice-window above the hearth. Outside, the mist was beginning to lift, revealing the high, sharp ribs of the rookery cliffs and the gray smear of the sea beyond. Other fledglings were already shouting down on the main path, their satchels slapping against their flanks as they hurried toward the village school. Usually, Penny liked the walk down the hill. She liked the way the gravel crunched under her toes and the brisk race to see who could touch the flagpole first.

Today, however, the world outside looked entirely too rough. The rocks looked too hard; the air felt too cold; and her breakfast, half-eaten and cooling rapidly on the gray stone, seemed like an insurmountable mountain of difficulty.

She laid her fork down with a tiny clink that she hoped sounded natural.

"I'm full," she whispered.

Martha turned, her brow furrowing slightly as she inspected the plate. "You've left the crusts. You never leave the crusts. Are you coming down with the feather-rot? Let me see your tongue."

"No!" Penny blurted, her flippers instinctively clamping against her sides as she slid off the stool. "I'm fine. I'm really fine. I just... I had a big drink of snow-melt before breakfast. I'm not that hungry."

Martha regarded her for three long, agonizing seconds. The spatula remained poised in her hand, dripping a single bead of fat onto the ashes below. Then she sighed, the feathers on her chest settling.

"Very well. But put your satchel on and fetch your woolen scarf from the peg. If you leave that breakfast now, you won't get another bite until the second tide, and don't come complaining to me if your belly rumbles during geography."

"I won't," Penny said, retreating toward the small entryway where her sealskin bag hung from an antler hook.

She reached up, took down the bag, and slung the strap over her neck. Her tongue, completely against her will, crept sideways again like an inquisitive crab. It slid along the smooth, cool row of her lower beak until it struck the small tooth.

Nudge.

The tooth leaned inward by the thickness of a hair, then, with a tiny, silent click that vibrated through the bone of her temple, it settled back.

Penny stood by the heavy driftwood door, her flipper frozen against the latch, her eyes wide with a cold, creeping horror. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a crumb stuck between the serrations.

The tooth was loose. Truly, definitely, unmistakably loose.

She pushed the door open, stepped out into the crisp, biting wind of Shiver Point, and pulled her scarf up until it covered her bill almost to the nostrils, determined that no one, not even the gulls on the chimney, should see what was happening inside.

The path winding down from Shiver Point toward the lower shelf was packed with four inches of crusty, refrozen rime that crackled underfoot like dry sea-biscuits. The wind off the pack ice was lively, carrying with it the briny sting of kelp wrack and the sharp, peppered chill of an impending squall, but Penny hardly noticed the temperature nipping at the edges of her ear-tufts. Her red wool muffler was drawn up nearly to her nostrils, bunching thickly around her throat and muffling every quick, anxious breath she took. Inside the damp, dark warmth of her beak, an entirely separate drama was unfolding, small enough to hide behind three feathers, yet vast enough to crowd out every other thought in her head.

Her tongue simply refused to behave. It possessed, Penny realized with mounting dread, a mind and an appetite entirely distinct from her own. For six years, that thick, muscular little organ had served her faithfully without needing a single spoken instruction. It had guided slivers of silver-smelt down the hatch, trapped elusive sea-lice against the corrugated ridges of her palate, and curled politely behind her bill whenever she recited her sums. Now, however, it seemed possessed by an unruly spirit. It slithered forward against the lower jaw like a blind seal pup exploring a rocky ledge, tapping, feeling, and circling the small, white point on the lower starboard side of her bill.

Tip.

The tooth swayed. It was only an eighth of an inch, perhaps less—hardly enough space to slide a dried blade of eelgrass through—but the movement sent a shudder directly through the hinge of her jawbone and rattled the base of her skull. It did not hurt, not in the way that barking one’s shin on a granite boulder hurt. Instead, it produced a hollow, spongy throb, accompanied by an unsettling wet suction that made Penny’s stomach perform a slow, greasy somersault. A tooth was supposed to be a piece of the body’s bedrock, fixed and immovable as the basalt foundations of the rookery cliffs. Teeth were not meant to behave like loosened pegs in an old sled.

She stopped by the second trail marker, a tall slab of gray slate encrusted with orange lichen, pretending to adjust the seal-leather straps of her book-satchel. Around her, the morning commute of the colony was gathering speed. Down in the basin, three old fishermen from the western cove were trudging up the slope, their wicker creels empty, their breath billowing out in rhythmic white puffs like the smokestacks of the mail steamer. Further down, two young fledglings from the third brood were sliding belly-first down the hardpack, shouting shrill challenges as their flippers steered them perilously close to the drift-fences.

"Morning, Penny!" called out Archie McPhee, rattling past with a heavy wooden sledge laden with empty oil drums. Archie was a broad-shouldered macaroni penguin whose yellow crest feathers were permanently matted with coal dust from the harbor pump-house. "Keep your flippers tucked on the second bend! The spray off the reef froze over the cobbles last night, slicker than seal grease on a hot skillet!"

Penny offered a muffled, noncommittal nod, keeping her bill clamped tight beneath the folds of red wool. She did not dare speak. Speaking required moving the lower jaw, and moving the lower jaw meant risking that the wobbly little intruder might tilt the wrong way, snap free, or plunge into her gullet before she could figure out what had gone wrong. She waited until the hollow rumble of Archie’s sledge faded around the corner of the smoking shed before letting out a thin, whistle-like sigh through her nose.

Carefully, deliberately, she nudged it again.

Wiggle-waggle.

There was no denying it now. The tooth moved backward toward her throat when pressed, then sprang forward against the inside of her lip with a sickening little squelch when she withdrew her tongue. It was loose from its moorings. It was anchored by nothing more than a wet thread of gum tissue that felt unpleasantly soft, like an over-steeped turnip. What held a tooth in place, anyway? Were there roots reaching deep down into the bone, like the stubborn taproots of sea-thrift clinging to the cracks in the bluffs? And if those roots decided to rot away or let go, did the rest of her mouth follow? Did bills simply fall apart, piece by piece, until a penguin was left with nothing but an empty, gummy grin, unable to catch a fish or snap at a gull?

A sudden memory, sharp and terrifying, flashed into her mind. Two winters ago, Old Barnaby, the colony's venerable bell-ringer, had lost his pipe down a crevice in the pack ice. When he had shouted his frustration to the sky, Penny had caught an unobstructed glimpse inside his wide-open mouth: a dark, cavernous hollow lined with dull, yellowed stumps, with broad, barren pink gaps where several of his lower serrations used to be. Old Barnaby had to have his herring stewed into a gray, watery porridge that smelled like bilge water and had to be ladled out with a wooden spoon because he couldn't tear a sprat in two to save his life. Penny felt a cold drop of sweat trickle down beneath the gray down on her neck. Was she turning into Old Barnaby? Was she decaying from the beak inward?

"Hoy! Penny! You're standing like a frozen salt-cod!"

The voice was loud, cheerful, and entirely unwelcome. Penny spun around to see Toby Finch, his mottled fledgling feathers still tufted with down around the ears, sliding toward her on his belly. He dragged his heels into the rime with a dramatic spray of ice crystals, popping up onto his feet with an exaggerated flourish just three inches from her right flipper. Toby was always either sliding, skidding, or shouting, and his slate satchel was perpetually scarred from being used as an improvised toboggan down the steep embankment behind the cooperage.

"You're going to miss the bell," Toby declared, wiping a smear of sea-spray from his cheek with the back of his flipper. "Mr. Clearwater was already hauling the big attendance slate out onto the porch when I passed the bell-tower. He looked sour as pickled dogfish. Word is, the school inspectors from the Great Southern Arch are coming down on the noon packet, and he wants everyone's feathers brushed and their recitation slates scrubbed clean."

"I'm... walking," Penny said, keeping her mouth nearly shut and speaking from the very corner of her beak. The words sounded flat and strange, like someone talking through a mouthful of wet sand.

Toby cocked his head, his small, round black eyes narrowing with sudden, suspicious curiosity. He hopped twice on his yellow webbed feet, circling her like a petrel inspecting an abandoned clam shell. "What’s the matter with your voice? You sound like you’ve got a throat full of bristle-worms."

"Nothing," Penny muttered, turning her head away to avoid his gaze and pulling the scarf even higher, until only her eyes and the very ridge of her bill were visible. "Just the wind. It's sharp this morning."

"The wind isn't sharp; it’s coming out of the south," Toby argued, pointing a flipper toward the weather-vane atop the salt-store, which was lazily swinging toward the inner cove. "It's damp and sluggish. My mother says it brings the sniffles. Did you catch the sniffles? Let me see your beak. Old Grannie Crow says if your nostrils turn gray, you have to drink boiled seaweed tea with two spoons of fish oil, and it tastes like burnt bilge."

"I don't have the sniffles!" Penny snapped, forgetting herself for a fraction of a second.

The sharp movement of her jaw sent the tooth careening outward against the tough inner skin of her bill. The sensation was so sudden and alarming that she gasped, snapping her beak shut with a sharp clack. Her tongue immediately shot sideways to investigate the damage, prodding the loose serration with frantic urgency. It was still there, but it felt even looser now, wobbling like a buoy caught in the backwash of a whaling schooner. Every nerve in her jaw seemed to ring like a struck bell.

"You're twitching," Toby observed, stepping closer and peering intently at her face. "Your eye is doing a little jig. Look, Penny, if you’re trying to skive off the arithmetic exam, it won't work. Mr. Clearwater made Barnaby's boy sit the exam even when he had a cracked flipper from falling off the slipway. He just tied the chalk to the boy's good toe and made him scratch his fractions on the floorboards."

"I'm not skiving," Penny hissed through her wool scarf. "Go away, Toby. Go slide down the hill."

"Suit yourself," Toby shrugged, entirely unbothered by her hostility. He dropped back onto his white belly with a wet thud, gave two powerful kicks with his broad, orange feet, and went sailing down the packed path, whooping at the top of his lungs as he threaded between two fishermen’s carts, his satchel bouncing behind him like a tin can tied to a dog's tail.

Left alone once more on the ridge, Penny leaned back against the cool surface of the slate marker. Her chest heaved against the straps of her bag. She reached up with a cautious flipper, pressing the smooth, leathery tip of it against her outer bill, directly over the spot where the rogue tooth sat. She pushed gently. Even through the hard, horn-like material of her beak, she could feel the faint, sickly shift underneath. It was like having a loose floorboard in the front parlor—every time you stepped near it, it creaked, and you couldn't pretend the house wasn't coming apart at the seams.

Why had no one ever warned her about this? Her mother had told her all about molting—about how the chick down would drop away in untidy, itchy patches until you looked like a plucked chicken, and how the sleek, blue-black adult feathers would push through underneath, tight and greasy and cold-proof. Her father had given her long, stern lectures about navigating the outer reef, about the sudden suck of the whirlpools, and how to tell the difference between the shadow of a harmless basking shark and the sleek, torpedo-like outline of a sea-leopard. But not once, not over breakfast, not during their walks along the pebble beach, had either of them mentioned that your mouth might simply decide to dismantle itself on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

Perhaps it was a disease. A rare, shameful condition that only befell penguins who didn't eat enough fresh kelp or who chewed too much dried fish. Perhaps her jaws were going soft. She imagined her whole lower bill softening into something like wet cardboard, curling up at the edges while the other fledglings pointed and laughed.

Don't be silly, she told herself firmly, trying to summon the sensible voice her mother used when the tide overflowed the salt-cellar. Things don't just rot in an hour. It's only a little tooth. Maybe it's just sprained.

Could a tooth be sprained? You could sprain an ankle on the loose shale, and you could sprain a flipper if you hit the surf at an awkward angle. If it was sprained, that meant it needed rest. It needed to be kept perfectly still, undisturbed by tongues, fish, or unnecessary conversation, until the ligaments tightened back up and cemented the bone back into its rightful slot.

Right, she thought, steeling her resolve. No more poking. No more touching. Just leave it alone.

She took five brisk, determined steps down the path.

Then, almost before her foot touched the rime-covered ground on the sixth step, her tongue darted out again. It seemed entirely powerless against the magnetic draw of the gap.

Flick.

The tooth shifted forward.

Flick.

It clicked back.

It was impossible. The tooth exerted an uncanny, hypnotic attraction. It was like an itch that begged to be scratched, even when you knew that scratching it would only make the skin raw and angry. The wobbly little point had completely colonized her consciousness. She couldn't feel the breeze on her back; she couldn't smell the smoky oil from the cooperage; she could barely hear the third school bell beginning its heavy, bronze tolling down in the hollow. The universe had shrunk to a single, microscopic square of bone and gum, swinging back and forth like a rusted gate on a windy night.

She forced her tongue down into the floor of her mouth, pinning it there behind her lower jaw with all the muscular effort she could muster. She clamped her beak shut so hard her temples throbbed.

"Ouch," she whimpered silently. Clamping her jaws together only pressed the upper rim of her bill directly onto the loose serration, tilting it sideways at an alarming, diagonal angle. A sharp, stinging pang shot through the gum, bright and cold as a splinter of sea-ice.

Penny gasped, opening her mouth again. The tooth remained canted at an awkward slant, resting crookedly against her inner cheek like a fallen fencepost. Panic, pure and icy, flooded her veins. Now she had done it. She had pushed it out of line, and it would stay like that forever, poking into her cheek with every breath, a permanent, crooked monument to her clumsiness.

Trembling, she used the very tip of her tongue to nudge the stray point from the side. With a tiny, almost imperceptible pop, it righted itself, returning to its upright, wobbly posture.

Penny let out a long, shuddering breath that frosted the red wool of her muffler until it glistened with tiny white beads. Her knees felt weak, as if she had just spent an hour battling the strong currents of the outer channel.

Below her, the school yard was filling with fledglings. The bell had ceased its heavy swinging, and the iron clapper hung still against the rim. Through the mist, she could see Mr. Clearwater standing on the top step of the schoolhouse porch, a tall, severe gentoo penguin with an immaculate white stripe running across the crown of his head and a long willow switch tucked firmly under his left flipper. He was peering up the slope, his dark eyes scanning the path for stragglers.

"Penny Penguin!" his voice carried clearly across the hollow, dry and sharp as snapping kindling. "Are you intending to join the class before the noon tide, or have you decided to take up permanent residence beside the slate marker?"

A chorus of shrill giggles erupted from the steps below, where a cluster of younger chicks had gathered around the scrape-board.

Penny’s heart gave another desperate thump. She adjusted her satchel strap, pulled her scarf up to the very bridge of her bill, and began to waddle down the steep incline as fast as her yellow feet would carry her, every step sending a tiny, treacherous jolt straight to the strange little wiggle in her jaw.