Miss Elizabeth's Left Hand

'She sealed her wayward limb inside a glass jar.'

Miss Elizabeth was a witch prone to misplacement. She would lose track of the usual things; her broom whenever she really needed it, the spell book she had promised to lend a friend three years ago, and most of her cats one way or another. At least the poor moggies could find their own way home.

Her garden was filled with stone toads. Each one had been conjured to hide her spare keys in case she lost the others – which she often did – and all of them did the job too well for her to ever find the treasure beneath them. If she wanted to get into her house, she would have to conjure yet another grey amphibian for her garden and retrieve the key from beneath its webbed feet before she lost that one too. She would inevitably misplace the spare before she could put it back, and that was how her garden came to be filled with little carved creatures guarding nothing but dirt. The lawn was now more stone than grass. Real toads avoided the area. Perhaps they feared the witch had a fondness for petrifying their kind.

Miss Elizabeth had a bad habit of forgetting where she had left the more important things too – those that most people found impossible to lose. Her Victorian-style house for one, with its burial mounds in the wood out the back. If she was in the house, she might misplace an entire room for a week. Her iron bedframe often found itself on the roof while the mattress and sheets arranged themselves on the veranda.

Worst of all was her inability to keep track of her own left hand. Those were not so easily conjured as toads, and it was quite the inconvenience. If she did not concentrate while travelling in the void between worlds, she could easily return home to find herself short one limb and would have to retrace her flight to see where her hand had ended up.

Her searches have taken her to a sandy place where great walls of vertical lakes soaked her through until she found her hand balancing precariously on the back of a stingray. She has visited a world where the snows only fell from the waist down and created a blizzard around her legs but otherwise left her head and shoulders in the clear air. Her hand had been half frozen by the time she found it. The worst so far was a world where the sky was a blazing inferno and the flames licked down instead of up. A ghastly, heated land that one. Miss Elizabeth came from the cool, tranquil world of rolling hills and fragrant heather, where fires were few and far between.

After so many years of losing and finding her left hand – sometimes for sale in a backwater pawnshop, sometimes held in the mouth of one of her cats or trapped in the cogs of some strange timepiece inside the shop of Harburr the clockmaker – Miss Elizabeth took action. She sealed her wayward limb inside a glass jar and bewitched it to never move from its spot on the mantelpiece. She then visited the Magical Oddities shop on the high street and commissioned a new hand from the Creator.

It was paid for with the money she had been saving to buy a new broom that would have a locator spell carved into the grip. She would only have found a way to lose that too. Besides, her current broom still got her where she needed to go, even if the flight was made uncomfortable by the fact that it would only function if she sat on it upside down. Many hats had been lost that way until she gave up wearing them altogether.

The hand the Creator crafted for her was beautiful in a rustic sort of way and functioned more or less like any other appendage. The brass fingers, almost bone-like in their intricacy, were held together with dark screws and lengths of umber-coloured cord. They moved however Miss Elizabeth wished them to, but they also had the tendency to move entirely of their own accord. The Creator said it was the best he could do, advised her to avoid strong magnets, and sent her on her way.

Rather than solve the dilemma of the missing hand, it made it worse. The mechanical one would disappear just as often as the original, and even her own hand regularly vanished from beneath the glass jar. Miss Elizabeth, on her next excursion to find her left hand – the flesh one this time – comforted herself with the knowledge that three hands were better than two, and her odds of keeping hold of one were better than before.