Part 2

But in the blink of an eye, everything changed!

The grand secret of Barnaby the albino gorilla was finally laid bare before a stunned audience.

It turned out that the mighty, terrifying Barnaby was not a criminal mastermind or a hardened jungle philosopher at all.

He was simply short-sighted.

Extremely, drastically short-sighted. 🍌

For over a decade, Barnaby had been squinting at the world because everything beyond two feet in front of his nose was an absolute blurry smear.

When he stared down at the tourists with that terrifying, judgment-filled glare, he wasn’t planning a revolution.

He was literally just trying to figure out if that weird shape in front of him was a human, a tree trunk, or a very large rock.

His deep forehead wrinkles weren’t formed by intense, brooding anger.

They were formed by ten long years of straining his facial muscles just to see what kind of food was thrown into his enclosure.

And as for that famous, sour, tight-lipped expression everyone feared?

He was just holding his mouth tight so he wouldn’t accidentally drool while concentrating so hard on basic shapes.

The moment he took that bite of the banana on Tuesday afternoon, his sense of taste triggered an intense memory.

He realized at that exact second that he had taken a bite of a banana that was still half-unpeeled with bitter rind.

His eyes snapped wide open in sheer shock, his pink eyelids stretching out fully for the first time in his adult life.

The sight of his wide, round eyes exposed the truth to the entire world.

Underneath the frost-white fur and the dramatic wrinkles was a completely innocent, slightly goofy soul who just wanted sweet fruit and a pair of reading glasses.

When his eyes opened wide in that split second of banana-rind realization, he looked around the enclosure.

For the first time in years, the sudden shift in his facial posture allowed a tiny bit more light into his pupils.

He saw the crowd clearly for a fraction of a second.

He saw three hundred human faces staring back at him with dropped jaws and wide eyes.

Barnaby panic-swallowed the piece of banana, his soft pink ears turning bright red in pure, unadulterated embarrassment.

He realized his entire aura of mysterious toughness had been destroyed in a single second by a piece of peel.

He quickly tried to squeeze his face back into the terrifying, grumpy scowl he was famous for.

He narrowed his eyes into tiny slits.

He pulled his pink cheeks up into tight wrinkles.

He pressed his lips into a hard, straight line once again.