"AAAAH, SPIDER!"

Aranea grabbed her egg sac and barely managed to scramble out of the way as the Big Woman's broom came down on her web. When would the Big Folk learn that spiders had no desire to bite them? They were far too big to eat and tasted terrible anyway.

She deposited her egg sac in a safe place inside a leaf of a nearby rosebush and turned to survey the wreckage. Building that web had taken her hours, and it was in a perfect spot to trap flower flies and bees that buzzed around the roses. As she looked around the garden for a safer spot to build a new web, she heard a small voice moaning from below, "Oh no! Smashed! Smashed to smithereens!"

Aranea looked down to see the tailor elf who lived in a crack in the garden wall wringing his hands over a broken spinning wheel.

The elf looked up at her and groaned, "Oh Aranea, it's terrible. I have only a few hours to finish the fairy queen's new dress for the forest ball, and I ran out of thread. When the Big Woman wrecked your web, she stepped on my spinning wheel. Now what am I going to do?"

"I think I can help you if you do something for me," Aranea said, as she spun a dragline and swung down level with the tailor elf's nose.

"I'll do anything, but I don't see how you can help," the elf said. "What do you know about spinning wheel repair?"

Aranea sighed. The tailor elf wasn't the sharpest needle in the box. She jumped up on his forehead and set her spinnerets whirring. Soon a long thread of bright silk hung down in front of the elf's nose.

"Aranea, would you really do that for me? If you give me your silk, how will you build your new home?"

"Don't worry, I can always make more," she said. "Come on, you only have a few hours, so you had better start sewing."

"This is the finest, strongest silk I have ever worked with," the elf said as he sewed. "The fairy queen will be delighted with her new gown."

When the gown was finished, the elf gave Aranea a big hug. "Whatever you want me to do for you in return, just name it," he said.

Aranea crawled up to his shoulder and whispered in his ear.

"You bet," the elf exclaimed. "That will be fun."

That night as Aranea sat in her new web rocking her egg sac to sleep, she watched the tailor elf crawling up the morning glory trellis beneath the Big Woman's bedroom. Slung over his back was a pincushion filled with pins and needles. He crept through the window, and when he came back out, the pincushion was empty. When the Big Woman went to bed that night, she would get a surprise. Hopefully, she would be too tired in the morning to go around destroying hard working spiders' homes.


Arakun
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