The Spider

THE SPIDER

Once a spider set to creating its last web of the year.
A sudden crispness in the air had alerted it to how little time remained for this most important task. Through the long months of summer, the spider had spun web after web without regarding them as being more than a way to meet its basic needs. But this last one must be different.
This one must be a fitting farewell to web-making itself.
There was no need to snare a final meal now. The spider had thrived on all that chance brought to it each day as it measured the distance between the branches of trees and down narrow cracks in the earth. It had ridden a single thread across the wind countless times and spread its net in the morning dew and the noonday heat and the still of night.
Now something more was required.
Before the spider grew too weak to balance itself any longer in midair, it must draw upon whatever strength and agility remained at its command to fashion a testament to the very art of being a spider.
This web couldn’t be a halfhearted affair. Every web the spider had ever spun, or even attempted to spin, must be remembered in this one. Every inch must catch the spider’s last sunrise in sparkling tribute to what had been and what could have been alike. In this record of one spider’s end, there must be an echo of all the webs spun by all the spiders in all the mornings of the world.
It must be a web that would make anyone reaching for a stick to sweep it aside pause before something so imbued with the enchantment that comes of weaving together, if only for a time, the bright strands of the universe.