Missing middles

Police in Tacoma, Washington, USA came upon one of the strangest lost-and-found items last 5 July, the day after Independence Day.

Officers of the Tacoma Police Department stumbled on a finger on a driveway in the 800 block of South Pine Street, according to TPD Public Information Officer Detective William Muse, KIRO 7 reports.

The TPD tried to identify the finger using a portable fingerprint scanner, but no information came out on the database. Police also inquired at hospitals about anyone treated for a fireworks injury during the Fourth of July holiday, to no avail.

A week later, a man claimed the finger from the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office. The man said he lost it and other fingers as well from launching fireworks during the Independence Day celebration.

Meanwhile, an anonymous man recently posted on Reddit a photo of his two hands with missing fingers.

The man explained that his fingers were amputated when he was one year old because of a condition called oligodactyly.

In the social media post, the man explained that bones from the middle finger of his left hand were undeveloped and “stuck” to the back side of the palm, while the middle and ring fingers on his right hand were fused together as one finger, so they were all removed, according to The Daily Record.

Reddit users commented, saying they’d “never seen anything like it before” and “a cousin has the same condition.”

But the condition was not much of an issue for the man with only eight fingers who said he had gotten used to it. Add to that, another commenter said, the man can’t make a rude middle finger gesture when displeased or frustrated.