The Happy Prince

‘The Happy Prince’ by Michael Haller

The prince wore motley. He skipped through the palace singing nursery rhymes—behaviour unbecoming of the eighteen-year-old heir. When dignitaries visited the castle, he kissed the men on the lips and genuflected to the women, addressing them as Your Graciousness, Your Peach-Skinned Highness, Your Heaving-Bosomed Majesty, and so forth. When the youthful and hirsute President of ________ arrived, the prince attempted to fellate him in the foyer of the castle, to the amusement of onlookers. The prince succeeded in fondling the Presidential member and was about to consume it, but the Palace Guard intervened and removed the prince in chains.

After consulting his ministers, the king held a press conference to announce that his son was an imbecile and would not succeed him. Rather than give the crown to the next in line, the detested Duke of B________, the widower king announced he was seeking a wife who would, he hoped, produce an heir. The criteria were this: she must be of child-bearing age, but no older than twenty-five; she must agree to take part in a pre-marital intercourse competition with other candidates to determine who could most frequently arouse the aging king in a twenty-four-hour period; and she must undergo medical tests that would determine the likelihood of her bearing a healthy child or two, preferably boys.

Stella of ________ won the competition and was presented as future queen. Their nuptials would take place on her eighteenth birthday. She came from a mountainous northern region known for its beautiful but uncultured women. A dozen tutors were appointed to teach young Stella the finer points of courtly life, such as dining with knife and fork, conjugating verbs, and the art of cleavage exposure during royal entertainments. At these important functions, she was expected to play hostess, virtuous queen, and false seductress, who, with a nod of her head, could have any man decapitated for gazing too longingly on her bosom. In some cases, the unfortunate man would be taken away and beheaded while the party rolled on.

The prince was so overjoyed at his freedom from impending kingship that he began behaving differently. Gone were the days of braiding his long, flaxen hair into a ponytail that was the envy of all fashionable men and women. Gone too were the false eyelashes and other feminine accoutrements that he wore to infuriate his father. In reality, the prince was possessed of a dissimulating dual nature: while outwardly playing the dunce, he was shrewdly absorbing all aspects of imperial life. By age twelve, his tutors had pronounced him an idiot, but he had actually learned enough Latin, Greek, archery, falconry, jousting, fencing, polo, and other royal pastimes, that he was able to secretly continue his studies with the disgraced Earl of ________, twenty years older than the boy and possessed of such an insatiable carnal appetite that he once debauched an entire village in a single day. But as the young prince came into his physical maturity, he demonstrated an appetite equal to the Earl’s, making them a perfect match. 

The Earl risked his life every time he met the ‘simple-minded’ but oversexed prince. Banned from the kingdom and prohibited from any further contact with the youngster, the two nonetheless devised numerous stratagems to outwit the boy’s guardians. One such ploy involved the prince feigning a penile disorder that could be cured if he followed the instructions the archangel Gabriel gave him during an alleged midnight visit: ‘Only one of God’s nurses can heal thee, only the hands of a nun can relieve thee.’ The only nun in the kingdom was the recently arrived Sister Beatrice Raphael, who was summoned to the boy’s chamber. In front of the king and his advisers, the pansexual Earl of ________, dressed as Sister Beatrice, successfully jettisoned four ounces of semen from the delirious teen using a procedure deemed by some a miracle and others black magic, for no sooner had the nun reached under the boy’s blanket to heal his aching member, than a tent was erected that continued to grow until a wet spot spread over its apex. For another thirty seconds after the nun withdrew her hand did the boy exhibit spasms of either joy or agony, no one could tell for sure, for his shrieks and squirmings while restrained by the king’s bare-chested stevedores were so inhuman as to befuddle all observers.

The only person of import not present was Queen Stella. She had been confined to a fertility chamber where she was fed medicinal doses of tansy, chasteberry, and other herbs thought to aid in conception. But as the years went by and she failed to deliver a son, it was obvious the king was planning her execution, as evidenced by his hobby of beheading female dummies that looked like her.

Stella had never fully adapted to life in the kingdom and still retained some of her rustic proclivities, such as eating tomatoes directly off the vine, a habit she learned from watching deer raid her family’s tomato garden. (It was not uncommon to see Stella crawling the castle grounds searching for a tomato plant she could denude of its fruit.) Stella was well able to murder the king by strangling him with her long braids of hair, but the paranoid ruler was protected by henchmen round the clock, even when the king and queen made love. These devoted bodyguards had been hypnotised by the king’s sorcerer into strict obedience and loyalty. Anyone who touched the king without permission would be fed to the crocodiles in the moat.  Everyone in the realm feared the king and his vassals except Prince Rupert and the Earl of ________, who both thought him a depraved warlord obsessed with his phallic bulge. The Queen’s only recourse to survival was to befriend these alleged degenerates and persuade them to either murder the king or bring her back to her homeland, where they would be welcomed as heroes and free to live as they pleased. After discussing it with the two hypersexed hitmen, they decided to do both: kill the king, and bring Stella home.

First, the Earl got rid of the king’s sorcerer by knocking him unconscious and setting him loose in a hot air balloon rigged to fly into outer space. He then disguised himself as the sorcerer and told the king that he needed another hypnosis session with his bodyguards, in order to reinforce the training they’d already received. The sessions dragged on for three weeks, because the king would only allow one of his twenty bodyguards to leave his side each day. Finally the reprogramming was complete. The Earl had trained the bodyguards to form a protective circle around the monarch when the murder was occurring, so that no one could come to his aid. Only the Earl and the prince would be allowed inside the circle in order to dispatch the king.

Stella approved the plan and urged its completion. Within a month the king was dead. The Earl of ________ fashioned another hot air balloon that would reach Stella’s northern homeland. The three embarked on their journey, lifted by the warm air generated by the thousands of grateful subjects cheering their liberators. It was rumoured that Stella conceived a child while floating home, but no one knows for certain who the father was.


Michael Haller is a writer based in Cincinnati. His fiction has been published in X-R-A-Y Literary MagazineMaudlin HouseFive on the Fifth, Chill Subs, and Jake.

@MichaelGerardMH      michaelhallerwriter.com