Ana and The Prophesy:

  by Don Ferrari

The Muffet household was quiet. Ana the youngest daughter couldn’t sleep and walked down the stairs to see what there was to eat. Her dreams were still floating around in her head and as she looked at them, she almost missed a stair and went tumbling.

   She looked in the cooler and as always there was nothing but curds and whey, her least favorite food, but she was hungry, so she took a portion and went to sit on her tuffet.

   “These tuffet’s are most uncomfortable,” she proclaimed to no-one, ‘I must think of a better way to sit.”

   She slowly dipped into her food, trying very hard to convince herself that it was something she liked and not succeeding very well.

   She heard footsteps and thought her mom was coming. She would get in trouble as they had little food and here she was eating the last of it.

   “Wait that can’t be mom,” she thought out loud, as there were many feet, not just two. She quieted herself and listened, and sure enough there were many footsteps, eight that she could count.

   ‘Who can that be?” she wondered and fear started coming into her. She closed her eyes in hopes that would make them go away, and it must have worked, for they stopped. She let out a sigh of relief and opened her eyes and - screamed, throwing her curds and whey up into the air, for there beside her was a large, - large spider, looking intently at her.

   Once she calmed some, the spider said, “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I had to, because it is in the nursery rhyme that you get scared.”

   “What nursery rhyme?” she asked.

   “The one that fellow over there is writing,” the spider said turning his head to the left.

   Ana looked and by squinting she could just make out an amorphous shape in the corner scratching on a piece of paper.

   “That’s weird,” she told the spider.

   “Not as weird as you eating curds and whey,” the spider replied.

  “It was all we had,” she explained, ‘and I really don’t like them at all.”

   “You should try a good fly sometime,” the spider said.

   “That doesn’t sound very good either,” Ana said and made a face to accent her projected dislike of eating a fly. “Are we going to be famous?” Ana asked the spider.

   “Why?” the spider replied.

   “For being in a nursery rhyme,” Ana said.

   “I imagine we will, but to what avail?” the spider replied.

   “I don’t know, I’ve never been in a rhyme before.”

   “Aren’t you at all surprised that we are talking?” the spider asked her.

   “I forgot to be surprised I guess, it seemed so natural, but now that you mentioned it, spiders can’t talk.”

   “Oh, I forgot I couldn’t talk, shucks. I guess I’ll just have to scare you again. You ready?”

   Ana drew in, ready to be scared.

   “BOO!”

   “EEK!”