Webbed | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Webbed | Previous Challenge Entry
By Katherine Kimbley
07/09/07
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He sits in a white plastic chair on his front porch, as he has every summer evening for the past fifty-seven years and waits. Waiting for life to be over can be a daunting task. Boring too. To
pass the time, he remembers.

He waits and remembers, recalling a time when he could rely on the strength of his hands to get a job done. He remembers sweat dripping down his sun-darkened skin and the pulse of his veins as they protruded from his youthful arms, laboring at full force. His work bench is now old, the wood rotting. His self-reliance as shriveled as the arthritis-hands resting in his lap. What has he now to rely on?

He thinks back to a time of companionship. When she was alive, he had entrusted her with the complete burden of his happiness, and she had come through. In death, she had left him unfulfilled…needs unmet, burdens thrust back onto his weakening conscience. No one to love him, no one to listen, no one to speak in the small silent moments of the day when a single sound from her lips was all the food his hungry heart required. His trust had been covered with soil years ago, and now served as food for the worms – returned to the earth.

He rests his chin in his hand and stares at the horizon. There was a time when money had given him full assurance of a prosperous future. There were years of scrimping and saving, holding out with strength when family and friends expressed their need. But, life had gotten expensive. Treatments are costly, and so the promise of prosperity was burned and diluted with tubes of radiation therapy.

As he watched a spider shimmy down the front porch railing, something occurred to him. He had put his full confidence in what the world had sold to him as steel-reinforced nets. As time wore on, it became apparent that all these things were merely as strong as a spider’s web, but just as entangling.

He sighed with tear-filled eyes and wondered what in this life was possibly strong enough to bare the weight of his full reliance. Could he be fully confident in anything? He hoped some one would tell him what it was.

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