It likely will be the enduring mystery of 2015 for the Toh family: The Mystery of the Blue Hand.

Nothing was awry Sunday evening when we arrived back home from the grandparents’ house. E2 was asleep, as usual, so I took her out of her coat and boots and carried her upstairs to bed. Her hands were, from what I can remember, free of strangeness. Just her regular, tiny, squishy hand flopping against my side as I carried her.

Monday morning. I go to rouse her, like every morning, with a cheery, “Good morning, Munchy-Munch!” She groans and pulls her blanket over her face. I pry it away from her clutched hands to uncover her cute, round face. A few moments of blanket tug-of-war. Then I notice it.

“E2! What happened to your hand?” She stops the blanket pulling and opens her hands to take a look.

The palm and fingers of the right hand are all blue. As if someone had coloured her hand with blue marker. We look at each other in puzzlement. We start looking all around her: pyjamas, her bed, her stuffies, for anything that could have coloured her hand. Nothing. In fact, there is absolutely nothing in her bed that is even blue coloured, with the exception of her pyjamas. We search her body to see if perhaps there was some dye in her pyjamas that also transferred off to her skin. Nothing.

I try rubbing off the blue with my finger, but it’s already set. We go to the sink to try washing it off with soap and warm water and vigorous rubbing. We succeed to only lighten the colour slightly.

We return to the scene of discovery and do another thorough search. Disappointingly, the results are the same. By the end of Monday, the blue colour has completely washed/faded off her hand.

This has baffled our family unit quite completely. The only hypotheses we have come up with are as follows:

1. She slept-walked downstairs in the middle of the night, coloured with her non-dominant hand onto her right hand, then returned upstairs to bed.
2. Her sister E1 slept-walked and coloured her hand.
3. E2 somehow grabbed something blue between leaving the grandparents’ house and her bed.
4. Her body performed some kind of strange alchemy with the blue dye in the pyjamas that neither she nor her sister (who has matching pyjamas) have been able to repeat.
5. Gremlins. Or aliens.

None of these explanations are satisfactory. And since this sort of case is too boring for the BBC Sherlock Holmes to even deign to look at [aside: though I would welcome a visit! 2016 is too far away], I fear the mystery shall have to go unsolved to the end of days. We will only have the memory of her small, blue right hand to wonder and puzzle over.

~J