Guidelines for Appeasing Kim of the Hundred Hands
by John Wiswell
Edited by Yanni Kuznia
Copyedited by Chelle Parker
August 2021
552 words — Reading time: around 2 minutes
1. To make an offering, be sure to visit the actual statue of Kim of the Hundred Hands. She is not honored if you visit a replica statue. The real Kim of the Hundred Hands stands in Sable Court, directly north of the campus gymnasium. She is hard to miss. Her many gargantuan splayed hands cast a refreshing shade that covers all buildings on campus no matter the time of day. You have doubtless labored under her gaze.
2. Students can lay offerings either at the feet of Kim of the Hundred Hands or directly in any of her hundred hands. She is copper with a cast iron interior, so you can scale her safely. All of her hands were sculpted to easily hold anything up to the size of a cooked ham.
3. Offerings of ham are prohibited until further notice. In fact, all meats are prohibited. The university recommends fruit or chocolate confections instead. The Leonard Knavs incident seems to have soured Kim of the Hundred Hands’s appreciation for flesh.
4. As you place your offering, hold your wish in your mind. For decades, she has assisted students with performance on exams and artistic endeavors. Every valedictorian of our university has been a devotee of the statue. She has sparked verses in our greatest poets, beats for our greatest musicians, and inspired Tessa Grasso to sculpt this entire two-hundred-foot statue in one night after a mere offering of a Butterfinger.
5. Wishes that Kim of the Hundred Hands forgive the university for any perceived guilt related to the Leonard Knavs incident are strongly appreciated.
6. Under no circumstances are you to wish for harm to befall another student, including their failure in any of our classes. Kim of the Hundred Hands is here to help raise you up, not lower others. We do not need a repeat of the Leonard Knavs incident.
7. Stealing offerings from Kim of the Hundred Hands is prohibited with a punishment of full expulsion from the university. This is for your own good as much as anyone’s. Although immediately departing the campus did not spare Leonard Knavs’s victims, most of them have regrown at least some of their epidermises.
8. Attempting to trick other students into stealing and/or consuming offerings from Kim of the Hundred Hands will render you outside our ability to save. Trying to sabotage other valedictory candidates is not “kidding” or “funny” in the eyes of the law, and even less so in the eyes of a vengeful copper-and-iron statue. We remind all students that a court of law found our university was not liable for what calamities Kim of the Hundred Hands loosed upon Leonard Knavs upon discovering his ruse.
9. It is prohibited to talk about the Leonard Knavs incident, no matter how many of us wish we could stop smelling his remains. We hope to have the campus classified as fully nontoxic and livable by next semester.
10. After you make your offering, it is custom to rub one of Kim of the Hundred Hands’s feet. Statistical analysis shows this does not actually benefit your chances of divine assistance, but it is not forbidden by university policy. It is a nice gesture and we would all like to be in her good graces again.
© 2021 John Wiswell
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