Little Hope, Chapter 3

Sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard, Little Hope had a commanding view of her room. The two large skeletons, Funny and Funnier, occupied the corner opposite and to her right. From there they’d sometimes stare her down and other times watch over her depending on her mood. The wooden box of small skeletons sat at the foot of her bed. She couldn’t see the box from her perch, but she could easily reach down between the rails of the footboard to grab a few for an emergency convening if necessary.

Her bedroom walls were covered with pictures, posters, and other things she’d made or collected over time.

She had two large expanses of wall as her canvases. She dedicated one to herself and another to the world. On the wall of the world Little Hope had created a sprawling collage of pictures she’d carefully extracted from the nature and travel magazines her grandmother handed down to her at the end of every month. Most were of exotic places she wanted to visit one day. 

The collage included, for example, pictures of landscapes, elephants, and temples in Sri Lanka, including that country’s peculiar Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. The idea of a single temple dedicated to a single tooth fascinated Little Hope, and the fact that the temple was the centerpiece of a royal palace in the center of a city called Kandy emboldened her to push back against her mother’s dubious assertion that a diet consisting almost exclusively of candy was somehow bad for her teeth. 

The East African country of Tanzania, both the mainland Tanganyika and the Zanzibar archipelago, also figured prominently. Her mother had read to her once from a travel magazine that the writer of one of her favorite books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, took his inspiration for the mysterious candy-making complex from a massive cement factory in the capital city of Dar es Salaam. She was particularly interested in seeing for herself some day the prototype for the extraction pipe that sucked the German boy, Augustus Gloop, out of the chocolate river and off to the boiler room to be turned into fudge. Maybe because she, like Augustus, was a bit pudgy, that scene from the Willy Wonka movie stuck in her mind.

Seated on a chair beneath the collage was a stuffed patchwork elephant that Uncle Mack had brought back from Tanzania. Like the skeletons in the corner and in the box, the elephant came to her prenamed. Uncle Mack had dubbed it Rufiji, after the river in the country. Also on the chair next to Rufiji was another prenamed elephant, Ping Pong, a gift from Cambodia. And next to Ping Pong was Deepdish, a brightly colored patterned elephant with big tusks that Uncle Mack had escorted in his carry-on bag from India.

In the center of the wall dedicated to herself were the campaign signs she’d made for a career day presentation at school. At the time of the assignment, she’d thought she might like to run for public office one day as a district judge or a state senator or a county executive. Unable to settle on a single office, she had made several different signs and waited until just before her presentation to decide which one to show. Her teacher guffawed when she held up the poster with the words, LITTLE HOPE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, said that Little Hope was too wise for her age, and gave her an A plus on the spot. Although Little Hope appreciated the high grade, she wasn’t sure she deserved it because she felt she had done a better job on the freehand stars on the campaign sign she had made for her run for Congress.

Alone on a small patch of wall between her bedroom and closet doors hung a picture of a baby hippopotamus that Mr. Chris, the school librarian, had downloaded and printed out for her. In the border across the top he had written in black marker, “Little Hippo, Big Dreams!” The little hippo’s big ears, even bigger eyes, and oversized head were out of proportion to the rest of its body, and its short and sturdy front legs appeared to extend downward from its neck. The one word that kept popping into Little Hope’s head each time she looked at it, which was everyday, was “determined.” She adopted the hippo as her spirit animal.

Every so often, before getting out of bed, Little Hope would lie awake and think about skeletons and hippos. Neither looked very threatening, which was one thing they had in common. The hippo on the wall had a closed, wide grin and big round eyes. The skeletons had big round eye sockets and, because of overuse or shoddy assembly, lower jaws that wouldn’t stay shut, which gave them their perpetual and sometimes annoying gawks.

Another thing they had in common was that neither of them floats. Denser than water, skeletons sink because they can’t displace enough water to stay above the surface. The same with hippos. Although they spend most of their time underwater, they can’t swim. Instead, they seemingly effortlessly glide across river beds and lake bottoms. Their eyes, nostrils, and ears are high enough on their heads that they can remain submerged for hours at a time. 

Somewhere beneath the hippo’s bulky body was a skeleton, but Little Hope had a hard time imagining it because the beast’s pink underbelly, large muzzle, and other oversized parts masked the joints and distorted the size and proportion of their bones. In that one important respect, skeletons and hippos were exact opposites. Whereas one was transparent, the other was opaque. The one thing that skeletons had over hippos was intelligibility. Little Hope could understand them easier. They weren’t full of surprises.