Member-only story
The Spider
A metaphor
ALANTAKUN IS A HARDWORKING SPIDER.
She wakes early, sleeps late and contributes her quota towards ensuring the survival of her race, but something is missing in her life. Alantakun doesn’t have a web.
Each day, as she walks past the many nooks and crannies of
the big house where all the spiders live, she sees gigantic, majestic-looking webs - mostly occupied by nagi eater spiders. Nagi eaters were the first settlers and history has it that they’d been in the big house long before the moon got its scars.
Everywhere any of her eight eyes spied, there were webs spun from the finest silk, beaded in dew that swallowed sunlight and spat out rainbows on the plain walls. Alantakun’s abdomen would quiver in shame from the deep sorrow she felt anytime she walked passed those webs to scavenge for shreds in the wastelands beyond the Spinnerets.
Even though she knew the answers, Alantakun couldn’t help asking time and again why she didn’t have a web of her own.
To spin a web, she needed a corner, and corners were getting scarce around the big house. She also needed silk, and silk was getting more expensive at the Spinnerets. Ever since the law forbade homespun silk, all the spiders in the big house had had to buy imported silk to build their webs and those cost…
