A genuine puzzle:

[mariness]

For Christmas, my brother gave my mother a jigsaw puzzle comprised of old family photos. She loved it, but had just one tiny, tiny problem putting it together: the puzzle was missing one piece. Finally, she took it back apart without finding said piece, and passed the puzzle over to me

Comments

[malterre]

You guys have some interesting "gifts" that run in your family...(Yeah I know, I'm one of the weirdos too..)

[mariness]

Which just makes it stranger, since this house has cats who can (and did) knock some pieces off the table, but my parents' condo is animal free.

Maybe, while they weren't paying attention, a magical blue jay flew in, removed a piece, and brought it here. I know as theories go that isn't a very good one, but it's all I got.

[fbhjr]

I think this is some sort of practical joke on your brother's part...

[mariness]

That was my immediate thought, but apparently not. This time he wasn't rolling over laughing, as he usually does with his practical jokes or when he's insulting the cats.

Where this extra puzzle piece came from remains a mystery.

[fbhjr]

He can be patient...

[mariness]

He can be, but in this case he seemed genuinely puzzled himself.

[desperance]

There's an old conjuring trick, as it were, which yields exactly this: a puzzle that you can put together one way, perfectly logically, and find a piece missing; put it together another way, perfectly logically, and have a piece left over. I don't know how it works, but I remember it from my long-ago youth...

[mariness]

Oooooh, fascinating!

I'm not really sure this jigsaw puzzle would have been that type of conjuring trick, though. It's one of those where you put several old family photographs together and then send it to the manufacturer who prints out a personalized jigsaw puzzle for you. I'm not sure the primary audience for that is looking for conjuring tricks, but now I am!

[vovat]

Is this like the groups of stones that no one can accurately count?

[mariness]

It does seem remarkably similar.