Human Glue - - Hilary Hanbury

Synopsis - 

You can never remove yourself from who you are. You can embrace it, run from it, pretend it never existed but what you can never do is stop it from being a part of you.

A family is the sum total of all its constituent parts like a jigsaw puzzle.  Unlike a proper jigsaw puzzle, they seldom fit together neatly, but are random pieces, touching at the edges and sometimes curving around one another snugly, but the whole picture is never revealed. People try to make them fit by forcing the pieces together, but that can be painful for the doer and the done to.

Other bits are sometimes thrown into the pattern to fill the gaps. This changes the whole thing and occasionally a small corner looks as if it might work. It depends on whether the random piece is captured or gets lost.

When a piece gets lost it affects the rest. The pattern must then cast around for other pieces to try to make it whole, then, all of a sudden the random piece is found and now, there is no room for it.

How does the final pattern arrange itself? What pieces of the puzzle will form part of the whole and which ones will never be found?

This human jigsaw is like the one that Grandmother had on the table for years, trying to find those random pieces and refusing to throw it away because she knew that one day they would turn up. Once they did, the whole thing would be glued together and put on display under a big plate of glass.