2420. Grateful for small mercies

When Chloe lost her head it was terribly dramatic. She lost her head not in a figurative way, but literally – when she crashed her car into a power pole. At the same time she also lost both arms and everything from her belly button up.

“Thank goodness she still has two legs,” said her mother, “else she wouldn’t be able to get around. I’m more than aware of the sacrifice I have to make to feed her through tubes in her knees. It takes up a lot of my time. But how lucky can one get? One has to admit that when the specialists sewed her two legs onto a wooden plank so she could walk again she was lucky to survive the operation. It was touch and go for a while. One must be grateful for small mercies.”

“Of course,” continued Chloe’s mother, “she costs me a small fortune in shoes, but it is balanced by her not needing anything else to wear. And if she’s feeling creative – mothers know these things – I decorate her legs with removable tattoo thingies and sometimes with ribbons.”

“When her legs are all dolled up what a pretty picture she presents. Everyone who passes in the street stares mouth agape in obvious admiration.”

2246. Out on a limb

Julie was generous to a fault. She was forever helping out others, usually working with her church’s Friend-In-Need Committee. Her confinement in a wheelchair didn’t stop her; after all, the church had a wheelchair ramp which Julie herself had paid for.

Julie had only one leg and one arm. “It makes me appreciate how useful a hand is,” said Julie. “I used to take things like that for granted. Not so any more.”

Ironically the loss of her two limbs had resulted from the very generosity for which she was renowned. Someone had said in a church committee meeting that Julie would give an arm and a leg to help out, and she did. Generous to a fault indeed!

And now a new emergency had cropped up. Julie was there to help instantly. “Did they want a hand?”

2003. The fortunes of Mavis

It was no fault of Mavis that she was born with two noses. She had four nostrils. It didn’t seem to add to her sense of smell; in fact compared to some her smell appeared sometimes below par.

Some people were appalled at the sight of her, but it’s amazing what you can get used to with familiarity. It’s only ignorance that prevents people from looking beyond appearances. Yes, I suppose Mavis having two noses and four nostrils did make her ugly to look at and difficult to relate to, but underneath she had a sparkling personality and that’s what matters.

Not even having four ears could distract from her noses. She “cheated” a bit with her ears because she let her hair grow down over them and most people didn’t notice. It was only at secondary school when her calculating calculus teacher got scissors and cut Mavis’s hair off to illustrate a point about the number 4 that people began to realize that she had extra ears. “Spare ears” the calculus teacher called them. Again, having an extra two ears didn’t seem to add to her aural perceptions. In fact, to hear her sing was a clear sign that she was tone deaf.

To be fair, her tone deafness might not have been brought about by having four ears. It might have been caused by the fact that she had two tongues. She wasn’t (dear me, no) born with two tongues. She was late in starting to learn to talk so her father split her tongue in the manner (now banned) of splitting a magpie’s tongue to facilitate human speech in the magpie. It made little difference to Mavis. She was still a late developer when it came to speech and always spoke with a lisp.

It wasn’t so much her lisp that was annoying; it was her stutter. She had the most terrible stutter, and with a split tongue we had the odious obligation to sit patiently while she said everything twice.

It’s not impossible that by now you’ve heard enough about Mavis to get a picture of her. She had lots of other things of interest with her body as well, like a fifth arm that poked out of her neck. All that need be said is that Mavis’s luck changed around her twentieth birthday. A fairly insignificant artist – Pablo someone – asked her to pose for a painting. She did so, and has never looked back.