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Once there was a Boy with Big Hands. His hands were so big he could hold whole people within them. He was gentle, and used his hands to fix the broken people he found in the world. But this did not always work, as you will see.

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When the Boy with Big Hands was first born, his hands were as big as his father's. And as he grew bigger, as babies do, his hands grew too. When he was four years old, he could hold whole dogs in his hands, big dogs like St. Bernards and Great Danes. He was always so gentle that sometimes the dog would fall to sleep right there in his hands, and the boy would not move so as not to disturb its sleep.

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The Boy with Big Hands lived in a broken home with his Mommy and Daddy. The house was splitting down the middle. The Mommy and Daddy did the best they could to keep it together. They tried taping the two halves together, and that worked for a while. But eventually the tape broke. Then they tried nailing boards across the cracks to keep it from tearing completely in two. But eventually the nails fell out, or the wood rotted. They even tried superglue, but the two halves would never stay together long enough for the glue to hold. It got cold in the winter, and when it rained they put pots and pans out to catch the leaking water.

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Now the Daddy of the Boy with Big Hands was broken from before he married the Mommy, and he only got worse as the Boy grew older. And the Mommy, who used to be whole, started breaking too, because she worked so hard at fixing the Daddy. Of course, as they both were breaking, they stopped trying to keep the house from breaking, and it got worse and worse. The Boy with Big Hands used to try holding the two halves together, but his arms just weren't long enough. And even though his fingers were as big as small trees, even though his hands were the size of whole people, he couldn't hold his Mommy and Daddy together. They were too big even for his big hands. So when he was finally all grown up, he left all the broken pieces behind and went on a journey. He wanted to find people he could hold together with his big, big hands.

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