Word Count: 408
He is a strange little boy, lonely with no brothers or sisters. Raised alone by his mom. His father was killed in the Afghanistan war when he was four.
He likes school but he has no real friends there. Where he lives there are no children his age. His playmate is a daddy long-legs spider who he pretends is his dad.
The spider goes with him everywhere, though he doesn’t take him to school. He did once and the other kids laughed and laughed and teased him for over a week. He found the spider in the bathroom, climbing a wall. This was at the other apartment. He made sure he took it along to the new place but it must have lost its way around the unfamiliar rooms. He cried every night, searched every day, but it took a whole month to find him.
He was playing on the big old front porch with the spider. A girl with hot auburn curls and pink sandals walked by with her mom. He watched them walk up the street, turn and walk up the front steps to a house about halfway down the next block. His heart beat so fast like when he runs in a pretend game of tag.
Three days later she came by all alone. Stopped in front of his house. “Hi,” she said timidly. “Whatcha doing?” she asked. But she didn’t step up off the sidewalk.
“Just sitting,” he said from his perch on the porch.
“Can I come up?” she asked. Her name was Sandra, “but you can call me Sandy,” she said. She clomped up the stairs and sat down beside him. He stuttered out his name and started to sweat.
He hid the spider under a saucer he uses to carry it back and forth up to his room. They sat for a while, he a blushing red pink while he held out his fingers for her cat-in-the-cradle string.
“Let’s go to my house,” she said, “I’ve got a baseball and glove.”
He started to follow, turned back, saw the spider free of its prison.
“Eeeek!” the little girl screamed and jumped two at a time down the stairs. Stopped for a second and waited for him to decide.
He looked at her hair catching the sunlight, her feet poised to run. He stomped on the spider and proud as a hero, turned and hopped down the stairs.
Crikey Susan – how do you DO it – I said ‘Ow’ out loud when he stomped – my husband said “what?” and I couldn’t possibly confess that it was stamping on a spider which caught my sympathy – I am scared witess of them.
Bloody impressive is all I can say.
You know, I thought of you when I wrote this and almost named the little girl “Sandra.” Actually, I just went back in and did.