The lady with only one leg

Mrs. Taylor once told me the tale of a lady with only one leg, I would like to share that tale with you.

There once was a lady with only one leg, but it wasn't that she was born with one leg, it just fell off one day. (I'm not sure what the lady's name was, but I am going to refer to her as Kathy). Kathy was born on September 17th 1962 in Arlington, Massachusetts. It was a particularly beautiful day in September and the world seemed light. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world this beauty was merely a mask, a mask covering one of the darkest days in the past 60 years. On this day, there were over 300 humans gone missing. The eerie part was that there were random body parts found in odd territory over the remainder of that year. A leg here, a finger there, even some organs strewn in mysterious places, they soon were linking these body parts to the missing bodies. The mystery was never solved and pushed into one of those secret territories, in which if you were heard talking about it you would promptly be silenced.

Kathy was a newborn, pure and without the knowledge of the world's happenings at this time. She would remain oblivious to the truth of the day she was born until she turned 17. It was her "Golden Birthday" 17 years old on the 17th of September in the year 1979. Kathy's friends were planning her a surprise birthday party to celebrate her special day, but Kathy woke up to a surprise before her big surprise. Her mom had baked her a special birthday breakfast and brought it to her in bed. Kathy's mom really knew how to make her feel like a lucky girl, especially on her lucky day. Kathy devoured the baked omelet with tomatoes and mushrooms and onions and got up to get ready for her big day. It was then that she realized she had a large hole in her leg, as if a bacterial infection had eaten away a four inch circle on the side of her leg about and inch deep. It freaked her out, but instead of doing something about it right away on her birthday, she decided she would wait until the next day to show anyone or go to the doctor.

As the day progressed so did the infection on her leg. Kathy didn't realize what was happening underneath her very fashionable bell bottoms. The party was a great success and a total surprise, but she was becoming weaker and weaker as the night carried on. Her leg started to become somewhat immobile and that is when she asked to be taken home and thanked everyone for the best night of her life. When she got home she removed her pants and saw that the infection was covering her whole leg, she decided to say a prayer for wellness and go to bed planning to tell her mother in the morning. Unfortunately when she woke up her leg had been entirely eaten away and there wasn't any sign of a leg anywhere to be seen or found. There wasn't any skin or bone or anything. She shouted out for her mother to come as quickly as possible and when her mother entered the room she knew exactly what had happened. It was the curse of the day Kathy was born.

Kathy's mother wasn't aware that this very intense limb losing scenario would be the curse that affected her daughter, but she suspected some sort of wrong sometime in her daughter's life and apparently this was it. Kathy's mother wasn't sure what to do, they couldn't go to the doctor due to the fact that there was no logical explanation for this happening, but she had to tell her daughter about the curse. The only problem was that NOBODY was supposed to speak aloud of this, so Kathy's mother wrote the saga of September 17th 1962 down for Kathy to read and absorb.

Kathy read, cried, and realized that she was even more special than anyone she knew. She later decided to get a prosthetic leg so she could get out of the wheelchair and off the crutches. Kathy went on to build personal bird houses for everyone she knew and she got a tattoo of each birdhouse that she built on her prosthetic leg(it was more like a painting with permanent ink). When there was no more room on her leg to keep adding birdhouses she stopped building them. She married a man who was also born on September 17th 1962 and had lost all his fingers overnight while out in the woods. They shared that day, that mystery, that curse, and would share the rest of their lives together in Faulkton, South Dakota.

I never knew why Mrs. Taylor told me this story, but I wanted to let it loose, as I'm sure was her feeling for passing it on to me. Therefore it is yours.