He had been trying to compose a sonnet. He sighed. He couldn’t concentrate. Leonard mourned the dead man, who, in a fit of anger, had years ago thrown a pocket-sized book of sonnets, an unwanted gift, out the kitchen window. It had taken Leonard days to hoist the book up to his hole in the tree, where he had read it every day since, finding solace in the beautiful language. So what if he wasn’t good at sneaking about like a good spider should? So what if his family mocked him for his clumsiness and his love of tea? So what if loneliness sat upon him like a rock? He had his poetry. But that night, not even poetry could ease Leonard’s loneliness. Leonard sat in his doorway, staring at the blue-black sky beyond the heavy leaves of the tree. Below, a spider hung strung up in the fairy’s den. A cicada had warned Leonard earlier that tonight Fat was brewing a batch of Bluebell Blindness Inducer, which required a large quantity of spider blood, enough to drain a spider Leonard’s size to an inch of his life.
