Slow-witted Newsboys and Norwegian Alchemy

‘Cursed cursing sun, such a bother’. He twiddled and cursed and cursed and twiddled, his one remaining thumb rubbed through to the bone. When he thought of Norway the legless man thought of the legless girl he met in Eina, a small village on the outskirts of Oppland. He met her in a magazine he’d leafed through while waiting his turn at the barber. Her legs had been sheared off in a locomotive accident when she was a young girl, the train having run over her little wee body as she lay tripped-up on the railway tracks. The doctors jimmy-rigged a pair of wooden stiles to the ends of her legs, or where her legs used to be, strapped round her waist and hips with copper wire and clothespins. She learned how to trundle and skip, a pocketful of stones in each pocket helping to police the weight of her wee little legless body. She was chosen by the mayor of Eina to appear in a gardening magazine as an example of what a wee little legless girl could achieve when equipped with wooden stiles, copper wire and clothespins. How the magazine found its way onto the table in the barber’s shop is a mystery, the work of a Norwegian alchemist, perhaps, or a slow-witted newsboy.