the bearded lady

There was this boy who thought he was his grandfather’s leg. The grandfather had lost his leg in the war, which at the time was the best thing that could have happened to him. It got him out of a heap of trouble, got him home, got him home Scott free. No, he’d never missed that leg, had never mourned it.

Thirty years to the day he lost his leg, his grandson was born. From an early age the boy claimed to remember his former life as a leg. As a small child the boy often claimed he was a leg standing on the hot deck of a boat in summer. Later, his grandfather told him of the boating trips on Windermere, before the war. There was a time of wet beds, of nightmares, when the boy dreamed of the bullet and the amputation. But this passed. The dreams stopped as he grew older.

The boy did his best to be a leg to his grandfather, but his grandfather stubbornly refused to treat him as anything but a small, strange boy, and wore his shiny plastic prosthesis anytime he needed the services of the missing leg. The boy grew disheartened. When his grandfather eventually died of old age, the boy was bereft.

Now he was a leg without a grandfather. His life felt small and lacking in purpose. He took to staring out of the window of his room for long hours at a time. He contemplated suicide.

One day, looking out of the window, he saw a man on crutches in the street below: a man with just one leg. The boy felt a delirious rush of excitement racing through his veins to his heart. He knew then that he could go on being a leg, if only he could find the missing body he belonged to.

For a leg cannot stand on its own two feet. It needs a will to direct it, a body to walk it, a heart to pump blood to its toes.