It was so beautiful, a shimmer of silver highlighted by the dawn frost, a perfect oval with the crisscross of an intricate pattern within.
Anna bent for a closer look. She'd often wondered how long it took a spider to make its web. Did they stay up all night, spinning threads of silver, moving industriously, and where were they now? Perhaps exhausted with the business of creation.
Just as she was exhausted. She'd been up all night too, although it had been destruction, not creation that had kept her awake.
One last time Evan had said. One last meeting, one last kiss. Sophie need never know. And she'd tried to resist, truly she had, but one touch of his ‘oh so soft’ hands, one look into the darkness of his eyes, and all her resolutions had been swept away.
Sophie hadn't mattered then. It hadn't been important that Sophie had been her best friend since school, that they were blood sisters, a long ago summer memory of pin pricking their thumbs and touching them together. A touch that would tie them together - best friends for all eternity.
None of that had mattered when Sophie's husband had taken her hand, breathed into her hair. She'd simply drunk in the scent of him - lemony and sweet - always such a contradiction. And she'd fallen, yet again.
Neither of them had heard Sophie come in. It was Evan who'd turned first into the stricken gaze of devastation. Anna hadn't been able to breathe. Everything had stopped in that heartbeat of betrayal. Sophie had only said two words: "How long?"
Evan had asked Anna to go and she’d fled with soft steps of regret from their lives.
She'd walked all night. And she'd fetched up here, on the patch of heath land close to her home, looking at a spider's web and wondering if Evan would sort out the tangled web they'd created these past nine months.
She hadn't meant it - neither of them had but she knew it was too late for ‘hadn't meants’. She stood up slowly, leaving the shimmering silver web behind and wondered how long they took to rebuild when someone accidentally brushed against them. Maybe like friendship it depended how badly they had been broken.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.