Poes Klap Piet

Everyone called him Poes Klap Piet, and he was the kind of guy that Charles Darwin would have been really interested in.

He had these big hands, like seriously really big hands, freak-show collectable hands. His fingers were as thick as shotgun shells stacked three high. Each segment of each digit was the same thickness and same length – knuckle to connecting knuckle; they were all the same length and thickness. They were also put on backwards.

When pushed out flat, a single palm of his could hold eight boiled eggs without fear of dropping them. His hands were so big that he had to have a special custom keyboard made with the keys further apart and bigger buttons and heavy-duty springs. Most mobile phones looked like a six-piece Lego brick in his hand.

But this was not the interesting part about him. On his right forearm, bang in the middle between his wrist and elbow, there was a chunk of flesh missing the size of a Burger King Whopper.

He received the nickname Poes Klap Piet (his name was just Peter) after the time while visiting an eco-wood reclamation farm in Shongweni, a local community project to reclaim wood from the packaging crates of heavy machinery imported from Europe, a three-metre Black Mamba as thick as a stripper pole had struck out at him from a pile of wood he was looking at purchasing. With the speed of an uncut drug, fresh out the lab, he stepped back and poes klapped the thing. There at Peter’s feet was the unconscious snake, who, had it been able to think, would have been as surprised as Peter himself.

The farm manager, who was assisting him in selecting the wood he needed, saw the whole thing up close and in great detail and voluntarily became the chief cheerleading witness to the remarkable event, later leaving the eco-wood business to go and study public relations.

Thanks to the manager, the story made the local newspaper and then national TV on the main nightly news.

From then on he was know as Poes Klap Piet …the man who put a Black Mamba to bed…”fas aan die slaap”. For a while following the Poes Klaaping, he seldom paid for his drinks, but the world has a short memory, and with the advent of YouTube reels, he was in danger of being forgotten. Using his large keyboard, determined to make his prestigious title pay, he googled for Black Mamba breeders.

After purchasing a young female from a local breeder, he cleaned out his garage, installed some good lighting, and set up six cameras. Maybe it was because he skimped on the production company and went with a smaller camera crew of only two second-year film students, but the filming went horribly wrong, and he was struck on the forearm and nearly died.

He shut his YouTube channel down and refocused on his indie computer game business. The Whopper-sized hole served as a shameful reminder of the marketing event and drove him to work hard on a series of primarily text-based javascript games about the Catholic Church and their secret enterprise of farming magic mushrooms – an idea he got from a Dan Brown series.

On a game discord server, he met Garry, and although Poes Klap Piet could not knit, he was allowed to join the secret organization – The Tokyo Boxing Club.