The boy had been born missing a hand, on the left side.  But, since he was born without it, there was nothing for him to miss and he’d never know otherwise. 

He’ll figure it out, everyone told the parents, and though they knew he would, the mother wept knowing how cruel children could be and the father cried for all the girls he’d love, knowing that, save the special one, they would all fail to return his affections.

His mother loved him like any other mother would love a child, probably more to make up for the part that he was missing. He was too young to see the stares or hear the whispers but the mother saw them and died inside a little each time. In a world where it was ok to be anything you wanted, it still felt taboo to be missing something most people had.

“How about the flee market this morning,” the wife asked her husband as they sat in the bay window sipping strong coffee while the child, aged four now, played on the floor with a set of wooden trucks.

“Sounds like a plan,” the husband responded, glancing at his wife over the top of the newspaper pages he held in his hand. He was dark like the boy, with the distinguishing grey hair older men wear so well.

The air was warm and there was no need for the light jackets and sweaters they’d dressed in. Winter had turned to spring and the draw of warm, sun-soaked air had drawn the masses to the market that morning.

Too big for a stroller, the family of three walked hand in hand and hand in nub through the crowded aisles, stopping to buy sweets and warm pretzels along the way.

To the boy, the people were only legs, too short to see above their waists. Bare, pale winterized legs dressed in shorts and colorful skirts for the first time in months, desperate for the feeling of summer sun again. Feet flipped and flopped in sandals with painted toes.

At some point, little fingers slipped from their grip and nub from hand and the boy was lost in the sea of people around them, each parent assuming the other still had a hold on him.

Once the mistake was realized and after several minutes of frantic searching and screaming of the boy’s name by both parents, the father spotted him talking to an unknown woman a few booths down from where they were standing. The mother and father darted through the crowd, their son finally coming into clear view along with the strange woman’s grip on the child’s missing hand.

“Mom, dad, this is Mary Frances,” the boy explained, pushing off his parents hurried and hungry hugs and kisses.

His parents were confused, but thankful for the woman as she looked harmless, considering the possibilities of who else the child could have fallen prey to.

She was older, but not old, maybe in her sixties, dressed in what looked like a fortune teller’s Halloween costume. The bright oranges and reds and yellows mixed together as she moved, dizzy if you looked at her for too long. Her red hair fell against her shoulders in loose ringlets and matched the smudged lipstick on her lips and teeth.

“Well, it’s actually Robin now.  But I used to be Mary Frances.”

The parent’s previous assumption that the woman had been harmless faded from view and the boy fought against his parents as they tried to pull him back into their grips. The woman smiled and almost laughed at these attempts, letting the boy go without a struggle.

“Oh, sweet child,” the woman cooed, “have you not told them?”

“They wouldn’t believe me,” the boy answered, now, struggling as much internally with his secret as he was externally with his parents.

“Believe what?” his mother asked.

The struggling stopped, and the boy stood in front of his parents, the weight of his life pressed against his shoulders.  “How I lost my hand,” the boy answered, hiding his eyes from his parents as he looked back at the woman he had called Mary Frances. She smiled a grin of encouragement to the boy, urging him to let his secret be known.

“You didn’t lose it, you were born without it.”  His mother’s voice cracked as she spoke, anxious to flee their current situation, pulling on the husband’s arm, asking him without words to do something to make it stop.

“No, before, when my name was Nathaniel, not Andrew and I had a different mommy and three sisters and no food.”

The parents were perplexed, to say the least and frightful of what the strange woman had said or done to their child in the several minutes she’d had him all to herself. He was a four-year-old boy on a Saturday at the market but in the hands of the woman he’d called Mary Francis, he was someone else entirely.

The mother knelt to the boy’s level, looking at his eyes. “What are you talking about, you’re not making any sense,” his mother pled, the cracks in her voice falling deeper and deeper.

“I told you they wouldn’t understand,” the boy said to the woman he’d called Mary Frances.

“Understand what?” the mother asked, more to the woman than to her son. 

“You wouldn’t understand that Mary Frances was my mother before you were and that I stole a loaf of bread so that my sisters would have something to eat.  But I was caught by a Red Coat, and back then, the cost of stealing was paid with a hand,” the boy cried, looking into the eyes of a stranger who’d he also loved as a mother.

The strange woman knelt to the boy’s level like his other mother had, and it was just the three of them in the world. She stroked the boy’s hair away from his face and smiled.

“You were always such a good boy,” she whispered to him. “Always looking out for your sisters.” She looked at him with loving eyes, the eyes only a mother can have for a child. She held his face in her hands and began to hum a familiar tune. There were no words, just the gentle sound of mother’s love floating in the air.

“How do you know that song,” the wife asked.

“It was his favorite,” the strange woman laughed, “always put him right to sleep.”

His now mother had lost her voice and just stared at the two of them, looking longingly into the other’s eyes, searching and sharing memories of a past they’d spent together.

The now mother gathered her son away from Mary Frances and with her husband’s hand on her shoulder, they pushed through the crowd toward an empty corner of the market where they could take the deep breath necessary to process what had happened.

The boy played in the grass, picking dandelions and laughing like nothing was amiss. He played like the four-year-old boy they’d known up to that day, only know they questioned who’d he’d been before.

“That can’t be true,” the mother whispered to her husband. “Can it?”

– Jessica Simpkiss