Julith Jedamus
The Girl with No Hands
She was a poor orphan who was fortunate enough to find work in the service of the Queen. Due to her looks and good manners she soon became a chambermaid. Every morning as Liesel was brushing the Queen’s hair her mistress would praise her. “What beautiful hands!” she would say. “What I would give to have hands like yours!”
Liesel fell ill and the Queen nursed her herself, ordering poultices and tisanes made with lime blossoms from the royal gardens. When the girl recovered, she was more slender and delicately beautiful than ever. One evening as she was removing her mistress’s emerald necklace, the Queen reached up and touched Liesel’s narrow wrists. “What I would give to have hands like yours!” she repeated.
The girl so loved the Queen that she resolved to do something reckless. She asked a stable boy to fetch an axe and lop off her hands at the wrist. The boy stanched the wounds with nettles and bracken and wrapped the hands in a white napkin. Giddy with loss of blood and anticipation, Liesel had the hands carried on a silver salver to the Queen, who opened the bloody bundle and screamed. “Get out of my sight and never come back!” she cried.
Weeping, Liesel fled to the forest that bordered the palace grounds. For days she wandered there, sipping water from streams and plucking bilberries and chanterelles with her teeth. Once she found a wild pear tree and took delicate bites from the yellow fruit that hung from low branches. Finally one moonlit night she found a path that led her to a village on the banks of a wide river. As the cocks crowed and the village clock struck five, she found herself in the market square. A young boy was unloading leeks and russet potatoes from a cart. “He can’t help me,” Liesel said to herself.
As early light fell on the cobblestones she stopped in front of a small workshop. In the window, marionettes dangled from strings like spiders in a web. Their bright costumes and painted faces caught her eye. Through the open door she heard someone humming. A young man was seated on a stool, carving the head of a goose-girl from aspen wood. His face resembled in every way the face that had looked up at Liesel from pools and streams. She gasped, and the young man glanced up. Struck by the same resemblance, he came to the doorway.
Liesel held out her arms, the stumps soiled with dried blood and bracken. “Can you make me some hands?”
The young man brought her water in a tin cup and helped her to drink it. Then he told her to sit at his workbench and she did so, resting her arms on the dark wood scored by chisels and knives. Tenderly he unwrapped the bracken from the bloody stumps. To her surprise he kissed them as if they were holy relics.
“Of course I will,” he said. “But they will never be as beautiful as these.” Once again he kissed her scarred wrists.
For five days and nights, while she rested on a bed of straw in the corner, he laboured over the hands, fashioning them from twin pieces of ash. When he woke her at dawn on the fifth day the hands were lying on the worktable: they were identical to the ones that had made the Queen scream.
Then he painted the hands with limewash and linseed oil, taking care to add a little purple scar on the right palm where Liesel had burned herself on the stove when she was a child.
Carefully he fastened the hands to her wrists and led her to the arbour behind the workshop. When she sat on a bench under the grapevines and lay her hands in her lap they looked as if her own blood were coursing through them.
Later that autumn she married the young man. In time they had five girls, each with a purple mark on her right palm. Liesel’s daughters never saw their mother without her marvellous hands, but every night their father would remove them gently and kiss the scars he loved so well. Julith Jedamus
Fire, the Adamant
Flour for Snow
Myles Zavelo
WINTER HEAT
Yuxin Zhao
towards a science of haunting
T.C. Hell
Ritual poses
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)