Jemglyn, the Spider (Part 1)

Once upon a time, in a land where the sun rose and set in predictable cycles, there lived a spider named Jemglyn. Jemglyn was, to the eye of the casual observer, a fairly mediocre spider of an unpretentious species. Nothing about her stopped mere passers-by in their literal tracks. Only those who sense things their eyes don't tell them remembered Jemglyn for more than a few minutes after they had made her acquaintance, which few took the trouble of making.

But Jemglyn had hatched with a strange discomfort that few noticed or understood. To be fair, even Jemglyn didn't understand it. Some days she built her web and ran about with little thought for much else, as every spider should, but even on those days the discomfort chafed at the bottom of her soul. Other days, Jemglyn loathed her web and the conventional runnings-about. She wasn't sure why. She just did. The discomfort was stronger those days, and, though she usually built her web and ran about on those days as well, it was only because she wasn't sure what else to do. "Bweakulb", as she named the discomfort, waxed so strong those days that he barely allowed Jemglyn to do so, but, as I said, Jemglyn wasn't sure what else to do. Bweakulb told her that something was dreadfully wrong. The other spiders told Jemglyn that something about her eyes made them feel creepier than spiders usually feel.

Her neighboring spiders, even the ones that liked to have Jemglyn's approval, didn't really like when Jemglyn talked about Bweakulb. It made their legs twitch a little in their intricate webs and the breeze in which their webs swayed seem somehow menacing.

And so, Jemglyn rarely talked about Bweakulb. She felt him. She thought about him at night when she stared at the stars that sometimes seemed close enough to touch with her foreleg, and at others so far away that she wondered if she only imagined she was seeing them. The nights the stars seemed furthest away were the nights she wondered why she had been given Bweakulb, why Bweakulb couldn't go away and let her live like her blithe, unbothered kin.


(to be continued)