Congratulations to Milo Crean who made the second round of the BBC's national '500 words' story writing competition with his story, 'The Spider'.
The Spider by Milo Crean
The spider sat on the beams in the roof. Nobody noticed. That was typical; humans rarely notice anything as insignificant as a spider. But still he was there, and he was bored.
He’d been there for six weeks, five days, three hours and thirty-seven minutes. He’d been counting. What else was there to do apart from watching? Interesting... humans, they had so many unnecessary things; the box with moving people in it, the strange four-legged creatures they sat on and the wooden thing with black and white teeth that made musical noises when pressed. He used to be amazed when he was younger, but now he’d seen the lot. He needed a purpose, somewhere to go. But where? He couldn’t go down the wall. It was too risky. He might be seen. What about when everything went dark? No, he couldn’t see then, and his father had once told him that strange creatures roamed the darkness at night. So unless there was some miracle hole in... the ceiling! There was a crack in the ceiling where he could just about squeeze through!
“Well that’s convenient,” he thought to himself, as he skimmed up the wall and crawled through the gap.
The last thing he remembered was an invisible force picking him up, and hurling him through the air into a large bushy green thing, before everything blacked out...
He woke up on a slippery thing that looked like something his father had once told him about, what was it? Ah yes, a leaf... large-bushy-green-thing-made-of-leaves...a bush! That was it. He peeked through a gap in the leaves and saw the ground fifty metres below him (that’s fifty centimetres to you and me) and an extremely clever instinct told him not to jump. He surveyed the situation. He imagined epic swings, complicated contraptions, flying through the air at two-kabillion miles an hour, giant rockets, incredibly long ladders, and for some reason, disco dancing robots. But none of these were the answer. So what did he do?
Gradually, at the back of his mind, an ancestral memory awakened... Web trapezes! Spinning like a tornado he swung down like a bullet. It was exhilarating.
He reached the bottom and sped towards the garden gate. But before he got there something glimmered in the corner of his eye. Seven pearly eggs lay in the middle of the lawn.
“Must have blown out of the egg sac”, he thought, “I should save them”- so he gently scooped them up. He quickly scuttled off to the house, back through the roof, into the room, and laid the eggs down. Then he realized something. Instead of sitting here for the rest of his life he could make a difference. He glanced once at the beams then ran off on another adventure...
Seven little spiders sat on the beams in the roof. Nobody noticed. That was typical; humans rarely notice anything as insignificant as a few spiders. But still they were there, and they were bored.
