Needle and Thread

1

Harry has always hated spiders. He hates their spindly legs and beady eyes and the way they scuttle across floors to hide in dark corners. He hates their element of surprise, jumping out at him on silky string and dangling in the air like a twisted mockery of an acrobat.

Harry has always hated spiders, but he never shows it. He lets them hang above his head, or rest on his bedroom wall, or creep over his shoes. Their tiny legs move, and he freezes, holding his breath and clenching his fists. No screams ever leave his mouth, no frightened shrieks or yelps of surprise. Harry merely allows the moment to pass - because it always does in the end - and then he'll move on with his day, maybe a little warier than before, but never truly paranoid.

Harry has always hated spiders, but he has never truly feared them.

Six years old, scruffy and too curious for his own good, Harry finds himself in the depths of the woods, not far from his grandmother's house. The trees are thick and dense, and mottled sunlight spills across the forest floor in a golden mosaic. His scuffed shoes skip fearlessly through clearings filled with wild mushrooms and weedy flowers. He's tempted to pluck them from the ground and take them back home, but his grandmother warned him of poisonous plants and their dangers before his shoelaces were even tied. She always tells him things like that, scaring him before he can begin to understand the true meaning of fear. Harry has never seen a snake before, doesn't know much about them, but he knows enough to be terrified of their hissing tongues and sharp fangs.

He's a quiet and shy child, but a child all the same. Children want to explore the world for themselves, want to uncover mysteries of their own, and sometimes even fear of the unknown can't stop their curiosity. Harry's grandmother thinks he is still in the garden, prancing through neatly trimmed grass with a bottle of bubbles in hand. Instead, he has snuck off with the intention of exploring the wilderness, an attempt to tame the curiosity he's so often scolded for when he returns home with wiggling worms resting in his palm or an old jam jar filled with frogspawn.

Harry thinks that nature offers the most interesting and beautiful parts of the world, but the adults in his life very rarely agree.

Growing up in one of the most rural parts of the countryside means there are about as many children as there are wood pigeons with all their claws - meaning a few, but not enough to fill the local school with the giddy laughter of youth. Harry and one other girl make up their year group, and with the ages of the other children being a mere scattering of seven to twelve year olds, their class room houses only ten pupils in total.

Harry likes Mina. She's sweet and pretty, and she likes to sing during their lunch break, humming through mouthfuls of strawberry juice with a happy glint in her round eyes. As nice as Mina is, and as susceptible as Harry can be to her charms, they aren't really friends. He doesn't have any of those. No one else likes traipsing through wooded clearings to find mossy caves or glittering waterfalls. No one else enjoys chasing after the neighbourhood cats with a stolen tin of tuna, pilfered from the pantry when his grandmother wasn't looking. No one else wants to join him on the outcropped roof shingles just outside his bedroom window, flat enough to sit on and gaze at the stars.

It is a lonely existence in a village so small, but Harry makes it work. He finds ways to keep himself entertained on weekends, and if he can't find anything to distract himself with, his grandmother most certainly can. Last Saturday had been spent weeding the garden, plucking pretty dandelions from cracks in the ground, their roots dripping with soil as they hung from Harry's mucky hand, like a tyrannical king presenting the decapitated head of his worst enemy. The Sunday before, his grandmother had taken them into the nearest town, stuffing them into fuzzy bus seats that scratched at the bare calves of Harry's skinny legs. The journey was long and tiresome, but he had gotten a lemonade ice lolly as a reward for his patience.