Habanero’s Hands
Habanero Underwood just couldn’t seem to get a grip on things. More specifically, he couldn’t get a grip on the steaming pot of stew he’d prepared for his guests, due to the fact that the pot’s handles were so hot they singed his hands. In turn, this caused him to drop the pot right on his foot, which then caused the stew to splatter all over the kitchen floor, and, as the guests were in no mood to slurp stew off a kitchen floor made of beaten earth covered in several layers of hay that had already passed through the horse barn, this caused all of his guests to go home disappointed.
By the way, the reason the horse barn had higher priority than the kitchen when it came to the hay in Habanero’s household was that it so happened that Habanero was the foremost horse jockey in the kingdom. This was also the reason that, although the singed hands, the injured foot, the splattered stew, and the disenchanted guests, which had all been provoked by his inability to get a grip, what distressed him most were his hands, which he used to for grasping the reins of the horses he raced. Indeed, in consideration of their condition, he was even obligated to regretfully announce his withdrawal from an upcoming horse race that had been scheduled in honor of the return of the Princess Venereal from a lengthy journey in search of the most ostentatious hat ever worn, a journey that had found its final destination with the person of Froufrou al-Bazooka, the clandestine hatmaker of Hisbaal.
Needless to say, Habanero’s announcement was received poorly by the King Boneface the Third, who could hardly stand the thought of how disappointed Princess Venereal would be to discover, upon her arrival at the hippodrome after such a protracted and exhausting absence, that the great Habanero Underwood would not be riding. Thus, the King swiftly issued an edict declaring that should Habanero maintain his decision to withdraw from the race, he would, as punishment, be decapitated in the public square.
Well, Habanero was anything but avaricious. Nevertheless, it was not difficult for him to imagine the disadvantages of being decapitated. For starters, without his head, it would be impossible for him to imagine the disadvantages of being decapitated. Moreover, although this was of less concern to him than his singed hands, Habanero still hoped to rectify his failure to deliver to the aforementioned guests the stew they had been expecting by having them over again, and this time remembering to wear oven mitts (remembering being something he also would be unable to do without a head). Keeping all this in mind, he promptly sent a statement reversing his decision to withdraw from the race to the village crier, whose booming voice soon reached the satisfied ears of King Boneface, a man who, though accustomed to it, never ceased to take pleasure in getting his way.
At last, the day of the race arrived. Before the starter’s pistol sounded, all eyes were fixed on Princess Venereal, and above all, her hat. The sumptuous chapeau, flowing and fluttering in the breeze and gleaming and glittering in the sunlight, had been fashioned from a shell rescued from the clambake held in honor of Hildegard von Bingen’s completion of the Phlegm section of her famous “Treatise on Four Humors,” the wheel from a broken hurdy-gurdy said to have been played during the first known performance of the Organum Triplum, a clipping of the cuticle from St. Teresa de Ávila’s mummified finger, the blade of a spear by which Prithviraj Chauhan himself was laid low during the Siege of Kalinjar, three pages from the Duke of Berry’s Limbourg Brothers edition of the Books of Hours, an elephant tusk sculpted into the form of a pornographic object allegedly employed by the Countess of Bologna prior to her abduction, and an entire stained glass window of unknown origin rescued from the cave in which Gregory the Illuminator spent his final years in supposed ascetic isolation, among various other elements.
Spellbinding though Princess Venereal’s luxurious lid may have been, at the sound of the starter’s pistol, the same eyes that had, until then, been glued to it like stamps to an envelope, were drawn like nickel by a magnet to Habanero Underwood, who rode his steed the way he always did, which is to say, the way the wind rides the air. At the end of the first furlong, he was already a full furlong ahead of the other riders, which was mathematically impossible, but such was the genius of Habanero Underwood upon a horse. At the first turn, however, things took a turn for both the unexpected and the worse. Because of his singed hands, Habanero was, precisely as he had feared would be the case, unable to grip the reins tightly enough to communicate to the horse the direction in which to run. As a result, the animal simply continued straight ahead, clattering through the barrier that separated spectators from racers and eventually colliding with Princess Venereal herself, knocking her hat off her head in the process, and, to the utter horror of everyone in attendance, trampling the relic to dust under its clattering hooves.
As a crime of such depravity could be rectified by only the severest of punishments, Habanero was sentenced to be decapitated in the public square without further ado.
