Richelle Sushil "The Two Spiders Fable"

Once upon a time, there was a problem and it was that the ceramic frog on the lawn and the gaps

between its webbed feet had provided lodgings for two spiders except one of them was dead now

which meant there would be no more silk for the intricate thread of the rest of its days. But the spider

(predictably) was no ordinary spider, and was, in fact, a brother, whose eyes had walked away with

their greenness and their sheet music despite the other spider’s pleas. The alive spider wept for days

and days while the blooms practiced beauty in their respective bushes and nodded their soft heads.

(They were practicing understanding, but it came across as feigned and trite so the spider could never

quite bring himself to believe them) Then, before he knew it, one sadness led to another and at the

end of it he felt not only the sadness regarding his brother but of everything all at once. The spider

worried he would neither have the things he desperately wanted like babies or a tenure track job.

The spider also worried that he was unredeemably selfish to be worrying about himself at a time like this.

At the end of the evening, he watched the trees breathe. There was time, and then more of it and the

wind played everything out of tune. He realized he would never again have a brother. At different

moments, he would continue to realise it again and again. That is all there is to say.

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Bio: Richelle Sushil is an Indian-Indonesian writer based in Jakarta. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Hobart, Wild Court and Honey Literary among other places. She tweets @RichelleSushil