Counting Down The Seconds by Weallens Lexy & Chris McMurray & Melody Breye-Grell & Denise Warner-Gregory & Jade Du Preez & Melanie King & Ruth Moorman & Sasha Faulks & Olga Guymon & Josie Teresi

Author:Weallens, Lexy & Chris McMurray & Melody Breye-Grell & Denise Warner-Gregory & Jade Du Preez & Melanie King & Ruth Moorman & Sasha Faulks & Olga Guymon & Josie Teresi [Weallens, Lexy]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Freya Publications and When Sally Met Sally
Published: 2013-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

I still keep spiders under yoghurt pots, but they are my pets. My friends.

Here are some things I’ve learned about spiders:

One. Spiders are not partial to solid food. In fact, a spider only eats liquid food, which suits her very well indeed and she thrives and survives on this and doesn’t get any grief from other members of the creepy crawly kingdom for the life choice she has made. She may look spindly in a certain light and in need of a good square meal, but give her a job to do like making a brilliant new web (which she does every day) and she will find the energy. I suppose she decides what’s worth fighting for, and when she’s done she can choose to hang like a spent thing with no interest in what’s going on in the rest of the world around her until she’s ready to spin (or suck her lunch) again.

That’s the thing about a spider, she is her own woman. Like you, my strong and spindly Charlotte.

Two. Spiders are programmed not to worry too much about their brothers. Or their sisters, for that matter. They are born with lots, so that if one brother gets squashed, or covered in deadly spots, and dies, there is another one (or two, or three, or four or… ooh, stacks) to take his place. The life of a spider sister is very straightforward, and never lonely; and the life of a spider mum is not described as “not worth living, not anymore, without him, not really” if she loses one of her spider children, because she is busy spinning her heart out to catch flies for the living ones.

Three. A spider knows how to deal with an annoying man.

Davey used to say rhymes like “boys are it and girls are shit” but he would stand between me and the worst of the name-callers and the chewing-gum-in-my-hair-stickers at school. I don’t think he would have grown up to be as bad as the boys who were scattered around you, Charlotte, like the crusts off your sandwiches—crusts that even I wouldn’t eat for you, if you begged me, because they were dry and dull, and would have tasted of nothing but disappointment. A spider has to have a mate from time to time. It seems it’s just the way things are; otherwise there would be no brave Daveys, no beautiful Charlottes and no dumb Daisys in the world. But the cleverest thing a spider does, I think, is to do sex with a mate and then put him in the blender for tea.