Famished Horse
April 16, 2015
This is more than a challenge. They want me to fail. That’s why they demanded: take Francisco Goitia’s dirty gold horse to your complex and make him a Triple Crown winner. Preposterous. The horse is several times three-years old and shows more ribs than a skeleton. When I introduce myself as the world’s greatest scientist, he’s too tired to respond.
Let’s start by christening you Hercules, I say, and motion for my assistants to wheel in nuclear wheat and atomic hay. While the starving equine eats, and drinks hormone-enhanced water, I inject him with pulverized testicles of cheetahs and lions and other fearsome felines.
In a week he’s ready to run but I swear I can beat him for a hundred years, and I’m no Jesse Owens. We increase his nutrients and keep running, a furlong, then two, half way around the track, three quarters, and by week eight all the way around, and he’s almost doubled his body weight.
Astonishing, Hercules, you’re seventy percent as fast as most stud horses, I tell him. Now we must put a jockey on your back.
I summon a fine rider, twice a third-place finisher in the Kentucky Derby, and explain our challenge. Soon after he mounts, a lasso envelopes his neck and jerks him onto the stinking soil of the track.
No one rides his bones anymore, says Francisco Goitia.
What did you do for this poor creature besides paint him?
That’s my job.
Mine’s to make him a sleek running machine. Leave at once.
As I dig for my cell phone, Goitia twirls another lasso.