Koritsi

There was once a little girl who lived with a family that didn’t love her. Yet, to her it didn’t matter as long as she had other pleasures of life—books, toys, clothes, coloring, and her older sister. 

One day this little girl saw a strange little creature while roaming the forest behind her house. 

“Hello, do you need help?” she asked the spider stuck in its own web.

Anansi, a gaint spider, turned to look at the little girl. “Yes, please—just move these strings here—and there—and that one too.”

With some effort the little girl freed Anansi from his own webs. “How did you get in there?” she inquired.

“Oh I was trying to draw a flower with my webs, but, clearly, it didn’t work out,” Anansi looked at the girl, “Say—aren’t you scared of me? A giant spider?”

“No, you’re only half my size!” she giggled.

Anansi and the girl left the forest, and went into the little girl's house. Her parents—both sitting on the couch, one doing puzzles and the other reading—turned to look at the door opening. There was the little girl with Anansi, but it didn’t seem like they saw the giant spider as they looked through both their daughter and her company. 

Anansi politely stepped inside the living room looking around the giant house, at the high ceiling above him and the room lavishly furnished. The girl had run up to her room to get dyes and coloring books, and she brought back a box full of them to her new friend. 

Both the girl and the spider left the house unbothered as they had come in. With the dyes they both started to color the coloring books. But Anansi’s limbs were unfit to continue in a little girls book so he took some of the dyes and started to paint an exterior wall of the house. The girl watched as the spider got to work painting a side of her house, wondering what he was doing. 

Just as Anansi was in the middle of his artwork the older sister had walked into the scene. “What are you doing!” she screamed. Anansi and the little girl looked at the intruder. “We are having fun,” said the younger sister. 

“Koritsi, what is that obnoxious, ugly thing up there!” the older girl was petrified. 

“Don’t say that, Adelfi! We are friends. Look—we've been coloring and Anansi is making something beautiful.”  

Quickly Anansi sped up his work—revealing his final product. The artwork was phenomenal, which put the two sisters into a trace as they stared into the kaleidoscope filled with strange color schemes. 

Anansi started bouncing on his own webs, “wee weee woo hooo” went Anansi, “come try this!”

As Koritsi was about to step into the web her sister held her back, “it might be a trap, you can get stuck in there,” Adelfi told her younger sister.

“But Anansi is not stuck to it. I saw him stuck to his own web before but now he isn’t,” Koritsi reasoned and then climbed the web. “Weee woo hooo!” went Koritsi, “join us Adelfi!”

Despite her sister's encouragement, Adelfi stood where she was watching her sister and Anansi. 

“Let’s make more of this inside the house,” the girl told Anansi. “Okay,” replied the spider. 

The whole day and the next, the girl and the spider spread spider webs and dyes throughout the mansion. The little girl looked at the rapid changes with astonishment. 

The mother and father looked around the living room, they felt something changing inside the house but couldn’t put their finger on it, so they didn’t say anything. Adelfi was conflicted and horrified, but didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Koritsi looked at the workings of the spider with curious wonder. 

Eventually, Anansi had turned the house into a maze, yet nobody else noticed what had occurred until the maze was near its completion, and then it was too late. The parents looked around dazed and confused,

“How are we supposed to leave!”

“It’s going to difficult finding anything now”

“Oh, how could this happen to us…”

Cried the parents as cobwebs separated them. The little girl was silent, her sister next to her whispered, “I thought it couldn’t go this far—how could we have just let it happen?”

To be continued...