This unpublished short story was fun to write. I hope you enjoy it! Happy Xmas 2011!

 

The mummified hand was a complete superstar at Show and Tell. It was absolutely, definitely one of the greatest Show and Tells ever in the history of ever. Mandy remembered that, when the never-ending list of punishment chores made her wish she’d never seen the thing.

But it had been there, just waiting for her. Well, not there, exactly, because she’d had to go looking for whatever had made the scratching noise when she was supposed to be looking in Mamma’s bathroom cabinet for Dadda’s gallstones.

She had only a vague idea what a gallstone was, but Dadda had drawn a picture and explained about his operation, and that he’d kept the stones that had given him such a tummy ache ‘as a souvenir’.  Mandy had always thought that souvenirs were meant to make you think of nice times you’d had at the beach, not doctors cutting bits out of your stomach in a hospital, but Dadda was like that. When he said things, they often meant something different to what other people meant with the same words.

Mamma said it was because Dadda had always wanted to be a mad scientist, and being a museum curator was the closest he could get. That made both Mamma and Dadda laugh, which Mandy thought was nice even if she didn’t understand it.

But there was a box in the bedroom, one of those big plastic boxes for storing toys or, like Mandy saw on the doctor shows sometimes, spare hearts. It was something for Dadda’s office at the museum, she knew from the stickers on the side. And just as she was pulling things out of the bathroom cabinet, she heard something scratching in the box.

Curious, Mandy had tapped on the lid of the box, and the scratching had stopped. Levering up the clips was difficult but not impossible, and soon Mandy was staring inside it. There was nothing on top but some old papers and pieces of cloth in plastic bags, all neatly stacked.

Mandy was a child full of curiosity, and rather practical with it. She had heard scratching and therefore knew something must have made the sound. She noticed the papers and plastic bags were all sitting on a tray, so she carefully lifted it up and looked at the second level.

That’s when she saw the hand. It was inside another plastic box, like a lunch box, and it was very, very still. It was wrapped up in bandages, like Nanna’s had been that time she broke her wrist. Poor hand. All broken, and it didn’t have a Nanna to belong to.

Mandy didn’t have a Nanna any more either. Actually, her first choice for today’s Show and Tell had been Nanna’s ashes, in that pretty pot on the bookshelf, but Dadda said that Mandy’s teacher, Mrs Tuller, might not like the ashes and that his gallstones would be better.

Mrs Tuller liked Show and Tell themes in her class. Last week it had been Sport, the week before it was Animals. This week her first graders were all instructed to bring something about the Human Body.

Mandy thought a hand was a much better thing to bring than a gallstone. You could see what a hand was right off, whereas Mandy had already forgotten half the stuff Dadda had told her about the gallstones.

So Mandy lifted the hand in the lunchbox out of the big box and put it in her backpack. She thought she wouldn’t ask , because if Dadda had wanted to share the hand he would have told her about it already, and if she asked he would probably say no. But if she didn’t ask, that meant he hadn’t told her not to take it. This struck Mandy as excellent logic as she rearranged her bag to hide the lunchbox containing the bandaged hand.

A few times on the school bus, Mandy thought she heard the hand scratching at its box, but when she looked it pretended it hadn’t done anything at all. Mandy knew all about pretending to be asleep when you were actually Plotting Things under the covers and she wondered what the hand was planning,

Mandy was a bit disappointed when the class finally took their seats to realise that Mrs Tuller wasn’t in. She was pretty sure that once Dadda found out that she’d taken his bandaged hand to school she wouldn’t get another chance to show it off.  But it was Ms Andi the student teacher who leaned against the desk, and Mandy thought it would probably be okay.

Mandy liked Ms Andi, partly because Ms Andi liked to be called Ms Andi instead of Ms Peroni, partly because Andi was a usually a boy’s name and Ms Andi was definitely not a boy, and partly because it rhymed with her own name, and that was funny. Ms Andi seemed to like her too, even though Mandy was what Mrs Tuller sometimes called a little troublemaker.

Mandy thought that maybe Ms Andi could be a bit of a little troublemaker too, because she had seen Ms Andi at the shops once, and she had earrings in her eyebrows and bright purple hair. Ms Andi had seen her too and told her ‘I like to dress up when I’m not at school, so shhhhhh, we’ll keep it our secret.” Mandy liked having a secret with a teacher.

Ms Andi greeted them all, and they chanted her name back, and she did roll call. Then she said: “Mrs Tuller has had problems with her car today so she’ll be in later this morning. She’s asked me to start with your show and tell about the human body today. Have you all brought something?”

There was a chorus of assent and Ms Andi began to point out whose turn was next, and they all stood up at the table and showed and told.

Elly brought her baby teeth. Scott brought his Grandpa’s false ones. Brodie, who didn’t have any tooth-related artefacts at home, brought the x-ray of his older brother’s fractured arm from when he fell off his bike that time. A parade of other body-related items appeared, and other things which Mandy couldn’t see how they had anything to do with bodies, until it was her turn.

Mandy pulled the lunchbox out of her bag, stood up and slapped the box down on her table. That should wake it up if it was pretending to sleep again. Then she peeled the lid off, reached in and held the hand up for everyone to see.

Ms Andi looked very interested. “What’s that, Mandy?”

“It’s a wrapped up hand, Ms Andi,” said Mandy, grinning broadly.

Ms Andi nodded thoughtfully. “It looks like the hand of a mummy, doesn’t it?”

“My Nanna had a hand like that once,” said Mandy, “When she broke it, but Mamma hasn’t ever broken her hand.”

Ms Andi smiled her nice, bright smile. “I meant a mummy like in ancient Egypt. Did you know that back then, when people died, their family would wrap them up tight in bandages and put them in a special building.”

Mandy considered this information. “Why?”

“Oh, they thought it would make the dead people happy in the afterlife.”

“Like in heaven, Ms Andi?” asked Elly, who came from a family who believed in Heaven, God the Father who didn’t have a wife, his son who was a ghost, and lots of other things which Mandy thought unlikely.

“Something like heaven, Elly,” said Ms Andi, “But an Egyptian heaven.”

Mandy regarded the bandaged hand she held with interest. Maybe the dead Egyptian had gone to Egyptian heaven and accidentally left its hand behind. That might explain the scratching. It wanted to get back to the rest of its body. The hand was limp and still at the moment, possibly listening to the class. Mandy shook it. “Wake up, Mr Gyptian.”

Its fingers twitched, ever so slightly, but no-one except Mandy saw.

“Come on, Mr Gyptian,” urged Mandy, “Wake up!”

“Are you talking to the hand, Mandy?” said Ms Andi, smiling like she’d told a joke.

“I’m trying to get it to move, Ms Andi, like it did this morning in the box.”

“I’m not sure a mummy’s hand can move on its own, Mandy.”

“This one can.” Mandy shook the hand again, worried it was going to make her look bad in front of the class. “Come on,” she urged it. No response. She poked it with her free hand. “Come on.”

Scott, who sat across from Mandy, poked at it as well. “Come on Mr Hand,” he said in a nasty voice, “Run around a bit.”

“Now, Scott…” began Ms Andi in a warning tone, but then the hand twitched again, then twisted in Mandy’s hand. Suddenly it twisted right out of her grasp and dropped onto the table, where it lay still.

Scott leaned in close to peer at it. “It’s not doin’ nothin’,” he declared.

“It’s not doing anything,” corrected Ms Andi, but they were both wrong, because the hand raised itself up on its four fingers and thumb and dashed across the table.

“There,” said Mandy triumphantly, “I told you it could move.”

Damon, at the other end of the table, squealed as the hand came towards him. Mandy thought Damon was a cowardy custard. Scott had picked up an orange pencil from the coloured pencil holder in the middle of the table and was poking the back of the bandages. The hand reared around, grabbed the pencil and flipped onto its back. After a few moments of twisting around, in which its bandaged palm was criss-crossed with orange lines from the soft pencil tip, it managed to break the pencil in half, then flipped right way up again and launched itself right at Sarah McMillan.

Sarah McMillan squealed even louder than Damon did as it landed on her neck and tried to squeeze her throat. But whilst a well-known squealer, Sarah McMillan also had four older brothers and knew a thing or two about self defence. She seized the hand in both of hers, wrenched it off her throat and banged it back down on the table with a crash. She banged it against the table a couple more times for good measure.

Sarah Panopoulos, who was Sarah McMillan’s best friend and the reason why both Sarahs were always called by their full name, peered over her friend’s arm to look at it.

“Look! It’s fingers are all wriggly!”

Ms Andi had come to the table, her brown eyes huge and round. “So they are!”

“It looks pretty with the orange stripes,” observed Namita, “Like a tiger.”

“Like NemoFish!” said Ilona, referring to the clownfish in the class aquarium.

“Like a zebra!” said Brodie, who hadn’t really got the gist.

Sarah McMillan pulled her hand away and the Mummy hand wriggled its fingers some more. Sarah McMillan dipped her fingers into its palm and away again, lightning fast, and the wriggling continued.

“It’s ticklish!” she decided. Mandy thought it was just trying to get right way up again, actually, but she was very pleased with how everyone was enjoying her contribution to Show and Tell.

“I bet it would look very beautiful if it was a rainbow fish,” said Ilona thoughtfully.

“I’m not sure…” Ms Andi began, but too late, Scott had already reached for another pencil and started colouring in the bandages covering the hand’s palm. Its fingers twitched even faster. Maybe it really was ticklish, Mandy thought. But no. Finally it wriggled itself upright, and it took off, across the table, down to a chair, then to the floor and across the room.

“I’ll get it!!” Scott flung himself between the chairs and landed on top of it. “Oooh, it’s a squirmy one!”

“I think we should let it be for a minute,” said Ms Andi, with a slight hint of desperation in her voice, “What do you say to doing some art time?”

The thing about teaching, which Ms Andi had been told and didn’t yet believe, was that you should never, ever, ever let them see that the teacher was not in perfect control. That hint of desperation, the attempt to bargain, was frankly a bad move.

Scott carried the wriggling hand back to the table while Ms Andi got out the art supplies, but once at the table he didn’t give it straight back to Mandy. “Lemme look for a sec.”

“Okay. Just for a sec, though.” Mandy wondered if Dadda would notice the multicoloured bandages on the hand when she got it back home.

Ten minutes later, coloured pencil on the bandages were the least of her worries. Scott was daubing bright blue texta marks all over the back of the hand. Namita, who wore a little bindi in the middle of her forehead, decided it needed some sparkle, like the pretty dancing ladies in the Bollywood movies, and had applied gold and silver glitter glue along its fingers. Sarah McMillan and Sarah Panopoulos were giggling as they squeezed some paints onto the lid of an icecream container, and when the hand finally got away from Scott, it ran right across the middle of the blobs of paint. It left technicolour fingerprints in its wake.

“Look at it go!” said Ilona admiringly, “It’s so fast!”

“Aha! Got it!” Brodie had taken the opportunity to fling himself on top of it. He held it aloft while it wriggled frantically.

“Perhaps we should…” began Ms Andi. She learned at that point never to begin a classroom sentence with that phrase, because it gets ignored so comprehensively.

“We should see how fast it can go,” said Ilona, who took a scientific interest in fast things. Brodie obligingly took the hand to one end of the classroom and let it go, and they all watched with serious faces as it scuttled on its digits. It had almost reached the door when Brodie pounced on it again.

“We should see how fast it goes with something riding it,” said Brodie.

Carmine had brought one of his sister’s Barbies in and willingly donated it to the experiment. Brodie held the hand down firmly while Mandy and Scott unravelled some of the bandages until there was enough to tie the Barbie, sitting down, across its back. Brodie took it back to the end of the classroom at let it go again.

Instead of heading for the door, the hand launched itself straight for the library cupboard, flattened itself, and tried to hide underneath it. The Barbie on its back made that escape impossible. Brodie picked it up again and shook it sternly. “Behave!” he said, the way his dad talked to their dog Bitsy.

The hand twisted and stretched its fingers ferociously towards Brodie’s eyes, but Brodie wore glasses, so it only left a couple of glitter-flecked paint smears on the lenses. That did, however, make Brodie drop the hand, and it took off across the room. Barbie bounced on its back like a rough-rider rodeo champion that never gave up, and the class roared its appreciation.

Mandy realised too late that the hand was heading for the corridor that led to the staff room and the principal’s office. She’d been that way more than once herself. She threw herself at the door, closing it just before the hand reached the gap. The hand staggered sideways, righted itself, and, with Barbie now listing badly to the starboard, crammed itself into the gap underneath the cupboard where Mrs Tuller kept the class’s What We Did This Year scrapbooks.

“I’ll get the broom!” volunteered Elly with enthusiasm, her normally cherubic little face flushed and eyes sparkling with the excitement. She seized the little-people-sized broom and rattled it under the gap.

“I think…” began Ms Andi. She stopped, cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and tried again. “That is enough, 1B. Leave that poor thing alone. Sit down. At once.” Her voice was a little sharp, very stern, but not too loud and not at all shaky. Firm and a little cross, that was the ticket.  “I said sit down. Now.”

The class, reluctantly at first, but – after cautious glances at Ms Andi’s determined face – more rapidly, sat down.

Ms Andi bent over and reached her slender hand into the gap until her finger encountered a stray bit of cloth. She tugged, and it unravelled a little more, but finally she pulled out the hand. It was struggling to stay in its safehaven, but Ms Andi was not going to be sassed by a hand. She scooped it up, placed it on her desk and used the straggling ends of the bandages to tie the hand to the drawer handles. It had to sit placidly on the desk or risk hanging itself if it tried to run.

“Well,” said Ms Andi, a little breathlessly, and then she said “Well,” again in a much more final tone. “That was a very interesting show and tell today. Mandy, where did you say you got the mummy hand?”

“From my Dadda,” Mandy said, a little too defiantly.

“Does your Daddy know you brought it in?”

“He didn’t say I couldn’t,” she prevaricated, but it was no good trying to fool Ms Andi.

“Right,” said Ms Andi, “I have to make a phone call. You, Miss Mandy Polotsky, will sit here at this desk and make sure it doesn’t hurt itself or anyone else while I’m gone.”

“Yes, Ms Andi,” said Mandy in a very small voice.

“And you,” Ms Andi raised an eyebrow at the rest of the class, and it was more sardonic and more effective even than when Mrs Tuller glared at them over the top of her glasses, “Will sit quietly and calmly until I get back.”

“Yes Ms Andi,” was the subdued reply chorus.

Ms Andi was gone for six and a half minutes. In that time, Ilona and Carmine had started bickering over the retrieval of Carmine’s sister’s doll, and Scott had drawn a five legged spider on his schoolbag. Mandy had sat watching the hand and feeling a bit sorry for it, because it probably would never find the rest of its body in heaven, and even if it did, it was all covered in glitter and paint and wouldn’t match the rest of it any more.

Ms Andi was more her usual self when she returned, but that steely calm was still underneath.

“All right,” she said, “Now, everyone needs to clean up their desk. Yes, Carmine, you can get the Barbie back. Scott, put down the pencils.”

The hand on the desk strained towards Ms Andi, its fingers outstretched. Mandy did not think it wanted to be friends. Ms Andi obviously shared this opinion, for she rapped it over the knuckles with a ruler. It made a gesture which Mandy didn’t know, but she was sure it was rude. She tried to pat it, to tell it how she felt sorry for it, but it twisted and grabbed her index finger.

“Ow! Ow! Owowowow!” It felt like her finger was breaking.

Ms Andi smacked the hand again with her ruler, and a third time. It dropped Mandy’s finger and sat, sulking, on the desk.

“Okay,” said Ms Andi after a minute, “Who wants to sit around my desk and try a new art project?”

By the time Mr Polotsky arrived at the school, the class had become Ms Andi’s little angels. They sat in a group around the big desk with pencils and paper and were drawing the hand. It had been hard at first, the way it kept wriggling, but Ms Andi had found some string and had tied it down really well. In fact, while the class drew the hand on their pieces of paper, Ms Andi had unwrapped the bandages from its fingers and was busy painting its fingernails with a lurid plum-coloured sparkly nail polish.

Ms Andi glanced up as Mr Polotsky came in with a very startled look on his face.

“It’s a mummified hand, Ms Peroni,” said Mr Polotsky, his voice cold with horror, “It’s an ancient artefact. It’s a thousand years old…”

Ms Andi stared at him and then said, as quietly as she could: “It also moves of its own accord and has tried to injure several of the students. It attacked Mandy as well.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Do I look like I’m being ridiculous?” said Ms Andi, but then she looked at the glittery, paint-spattered, nail-polished mummy hand and probably thought that she did. “Whatever you believe, Mr Polotsky, it was definitely moving, and definitely aggressive. I thought doing this was better than the children being scared of it,” she said. A strange smile lifted the corner of her mouth. “Though I think by now it’s more frightened of them.”

“I see,” said Mr Polotsky, very cool indeed now, “And the nail polish…?”

“It’s frightened of me too, now.”

“Quite.” Mr Polotsky was breathing heavily through his nose, “Well, if I could have it back now, please.”

Mandy thought that Ms Andi was annoyed that Dadda didn’t believe her about the hand moving on its own. Mandy was sympathetic – she hated it when people didn’t believe her about things, either. Ms Andi, with a steely look at Dadda, told the class to return to their desks and began to untie the strings holding the hand still.

When all the strings and bandages were untied, the hand just lay there, looking kind of defeated. Mr Polotsky reached out to pick it up, but as his fingers made contact with the bandages, the hand seemed to take fright. It leapt up onto its fingers and ran towards the edge of the desk. Mr Polotsky made a strange gulping noise.

“I told you it could move,” said Ms Andi, crossly.

The hand turned back and forth, but on one side there was a wall, directly ahead were tables full of children armed with pencils, and behind it was the woman with the purple nail paint. The hand did the only thing left to it – it launched itself at Mr Polotsky. The fingers wrapped themselves around his throat and squeezed.

Mr Polotsky clawed at it, making awful choking noises. It didn’t help. The hand squeezed harder. Ms Andi had jumped up and tried to make it let go, but it held on tight. Mr Polotsky’s face went very red. He stumbled away from the desk and fell to his knees.

Mandy leapt up from her desk, with a pencil in hand, and ran straight at them. “You leave my Dadda be, Mr Gyptian!” She stabbed at the back of the hand with the pencil, but its nib was too soft and it only broke in a lime green stain against the bandage. She scratched at it with her little fingers instead. “LET! GO!”

It wouldn’t, so she did that thing that she wasn’t supposed to do, and hadn’t done since she was three, and only because Scott had been pulling her hair so hard, and this was an emergency.

She bit the mummy hand at the wrist, as hard as she could, through its yucky tasting bandages. She could taste the paint and the glitter glue as well as something mouldy and leathery. It was easily the most disgusting thing she had ever tasted. More disgusting than brussel sprouts. But the hand loosened its grip, and Ms Andi grabbed it and held it tight in both her hands. Mr Polotsky sat on the floor, gasping for breath and rubbing his throat.

“Dadda!” Mandy threw herself at him and patted his face with worry and fear.

“M’okay… Mandy… fine… just… oh…my… goodness…”

“Mandy!” Ms Andi shouted for her attention, and she looked up to see Ms Andi struggling to hold the frantically wriggling hand still. “Where’s the container you had it in? Get it – now!”

Mandy ran to her desk and came back with the lunchbox. She held it up to Ms Andi, but Ms Andi didn’t have any hands free to take it from her. But now Mr Polotsky was standing up, his face much less red now, and he took the lunchbox, put it on the teacher’s desk, then turned to help Ms Andi with the hand.

The hand was twisting and turning really hard now. Mr Polotsky grabbed it by the wrist, trying to avoid letting the fingers wrap around his hand, and Ms Andi was trying to move her own grip so that Mr Polotsky could take it. In the end, they messed it all up and let the hand jump away. It leapt into the air, landed on the floor and scuttled with astonishing speed to the classroom window. The window being closed was a lot less important to that hand than getting away, because it curled itself up into a fist, smashed the glass and flung itself onto the footpath outside.

The whole class, along with Ms Andi and Mr Polotsky, ran to the window to see where it went. It scuttled up the path towards the carpark, then onto the bitumen, heading towards the road, and it looked like it was going to get away completely when Mrs Tuller’s little red hatchback pulled into the carpark and ran right over the top of it.

Mr Polotsky gave a funny little cry and ran out to see what could be done.

Not much, it turned out. The hand was rather flat and misshapen, though several of its fingers still twitched. Mr Polotsky made Mandy go back to the room to get the lunchbox. When she returned with it he, very carefully, peeled the hand off the bitumen and placed it in the box. The lid closed over it, and Mandy thought that really, the hand looked a bit relieved that it was all over.

“Is everything all right here?” Mrs Tuller asked as she got out of the car.

Oh. Fine. Just…. Fine,” said Mr Polotsky.

“Are you all right, Mr Polotsky?” asked Ms Andi, patting his arm with concern.

“Yes, thank you Ms Peroni. I’m… I’ll be all right.” Mr Polotsky stood straight, brushed down the knees of his trousers and turned towards Mandy.

“Amanda. Did you take this from my work things this morning without asking?”

Mandy shuffled her feet and looked at her hands. “Yes, Dadda.”

Mr Polotsky sighed. “That’s stealing, Amanda.”

“It’s not stealing if you bring it back,” Mandy explained, “It’s only borrowing.”

“It’s only borrowing if you ask permission, Amanda.”

Mandy knew she was in real trouble, because he had called her Amanda twice now, and that never happened unless she was up to her neck in it, as Nanna used to say. When she got home, Mandy was pretty sure that Mamma was going to call her “Amanda Rachel Rawlings Polotsky!” at some point, just to make the level of trouble she was in absolutely clear.

“I’d better take this to the museum,” said Mr Polotsky to Ms Andi, “See if it can be salvaged. Or if it should be locked in a cage. Or…exorcised.”

“Mr Polotsky….”

“It’s quite all right, Ms Peroni. I see you did very well to manage it and keep the children safe. I’ll…make a recommendation to the school.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Mr Polotsky, I think I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Ah. Yes. Quite right. Quite… well, I’ll be going then.”  He took a step towards the path leading to where his own car was parked, but paused to give Mandy a stern look. “You had better be very well behaved for the rest of the school day, young lady. I have to take this away now, but we’ll be talking more about this tonight.”

“Yes, Dadda.” Mandy hung her head, hating to think what that talk would be like. Probably, she thought, worse than all the other talks she had ever had combined.

And it was, and she had chores now for the rest of her life. There would be room-tidying and floor-sweeping and no TV and no cupcakes and no fun at all for ever and ever and ever…

But it was still the best Show and Tell in the history of ever, and that, for Mandy, made it all worth while.

 

(c) 2011 Narrelle M Harris