The Last Slice of Rainbow by Joan Aiken

Author:Joan Aiken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2015-07-07T15:02:37+00:00

“Ooh, Cal,” said Jenny, “whatever have you done with your legs?”

“They ran off and left me,” said Cal, very annoyed that he had to keep telling people that his legs didn’t want to stay with him.

As Cal spoke, all the butterflies rose up in a cloud of wings and flew away.

“Oh, poor Cal!” said Jenny. “Never mind, I’ll wheel you about in my doll’s stroller.”

“I’d rather wheel myself about on your skateboard,” said Cal.

Jenny was rather disappointed, but she kindly let him have the skateboard.

“Er, Jenny,” said Cal, “you don’t suppose your butterflies would bring back my legs, do you?”

“Oh, no, Cal,” said Jenny. “Why should they? You haven’t done anything for them. In fact they don’t like you much, because you always chase them and try to catch them in your handkerchief.”

Cal’s father said that Cal had better try advertising to get his legs back.

So he put a card in the post office window, and also a notice in the local paper:

LOST

One pair of legs. Reward offered.

Lots and lots of people turned up hoping for the reward, but the legs they brought were never the right ones. There were old, rheumatic legs in wrinkled boots, or skinny girls’ legs in knitted leg warmers, or babies’ legs or football legs or ballet dancers’ legs in pink cotton slippers.

“I never knew before that so many legs ran away from their owners,” said Jenny.

This fact ought to have cheered Cal up a bit, but it didn’t.

Jenny would have liked to adopt a pair of the ballet legs, but her mother said no, a canary and some rabbits were all the pets they had room for. “Besides, those legs must belong to someone else who wants them back.”

Then a friend told Cal’s father that one of Cal’s legs was performing every night in the local pub, the Ring o’ Roses. “Dances around on the bar, very active, it does. Brings in a whole lot o’ customers.”

Mr. Finhorn went along one night to see, and sure enough he recognized Cal’s leg, with the scar on the knee where he had fallen down the front steps carrying a bottle of milk. But when the leg saw Mr. Finhorn, it danced away along the bar and skipped out of the window, and went hopping off down the road in the dark.

The other leg was heard of up in London; it had got a job at the Hippodrome Theater, dancing on the stage with a parasol tucked into its garter.

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