Henry Cooper never learned how to walk forward, so backward was out of the question. He could only walk sideways.

Eventually, as Henry reached puberty, he started to think about girls and became extremely self-conscious about walking sideways. So he took action.

He did the only sensible thing he could think of and bought a pony, which girls supposedly loved. He rode it everywhere.

One day, the pony forgot how to go forward, making going backward out of the question. It too could only walk sideways.

Having grown to love the pony, he did the only sensible thing he could think of. He hired someone to drive the two of them everywhere in a horse trailer.

Soon Henry was the most popular boy in the school, with all the girls wanting to be seen sitting with him on his pony in his horse trailer, a fully enclosed trailer that only had four small windows plus a few vents.

Given his reputation as a “ladies’ man,” even the jocks started asking him to come to their parties in the woods and Henry would oblige. He soon reciprocated by throwing parties of his own in his horse trailer.

When the war broke out Henry volunteered. Every branch of the service rejected him—except the Coast Guard. They gave him a desk job on the U.S.S. Pennington, a 24-foot inflatable dinghy based out of Rockland, Maine, even going so far as to issue him a larger horse trailer that could better accommodate his desk and filing cabinets.

After an unfortunate encounter with a very aggressive pod of dolphins, Henry, his pony, his trailer, his driver Riordan, and 44 crew members of the Pennington went down at sea off the Maine coast

In his hometown, right there in front of City Hall, they erected a statue of Henry on his pony, waving out of a side window of this horse trailer.

After 20 years of constant vandalization and remediation, the City Council had enough and took down the statue, replacing it with that of the chief of the local indigenous tribe the town’s founding fathers had wiped out in the early 1800s.

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Tom Busillo’s writing has appeared on McSweeney’s, PANK, and Apiary. He is also the author of the 2,624-page, unpublishable, book-length conceptual poem “Lists Poem: Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Top 10 Lists (11,111 Lists).” After that exhausting journey, he’s focusing almost exclusively on shorter work. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.