Miss Muffet Triumphant

“Katie is a scaredy cat. Katie is a scaredy cat.”

The sandbox gang chants an endless chant of torment, perched high upon their climbing bars, a fluorescent metallic beast with spidery legs spread wide.

Pulling at her thin brown ponytail, Katie trembles. She imagines . . . If I could just—No! Her cheeks burn. She tugs at her ponytail again. It’s not right to think that.

“Katie is a scaredy cat.”

Like babies riding their momma spider’s back, the sandbox gang mills around afraid to spill themselves on the ground. Sucklings being nursed. A screeching, shifting brood against her alone.

“She’s afraid of heights.”

I’m afraid of you. There’s too many of you. You might push me. I might fall.

They begin to meow. Shrill feline caterwauls tumble over Katie, fueling her. Her eyes stare fixedly past them. She endures them. She imagines… a giant’s foot stepping on the baby spiders—squishing—twisting their limbs into odd angles, bursting their dark beady eyes.

Mum says there’s strength in numbers, whatever that means. Katie stares. But size is what matters most. She tilts her head in wonder. If only Miss Muffet knew that, she’d have squished that nasty spider.

Huffing a determined breath, she clenches her tiny fists. I’ll show‘em.

Silently she walks around the spidery beast, its many legs set wide and far apart. Instead, she is mesmerized by different limbs skyward stretched.

The Giant. She caresses its torso, a rough hide both sturdy and yielding to her touch. She pushes herself up, knees clenced about its torso. She pulls herself up onto a limb and discovers another with verdant feathers fluttering in the breeze.

The sandbox gang is below her now, their chants stopped, their dirty faces raised in awe. Higher and higher still she climbs.

Who’s the scaredy cat now?

The breeze touches her only lightly; it lifts her. Katie feels it push beneath her feet. Past the arbory limbs she falls. Beside the climbing bars she lands, her leg twisted oddly behind her.

Caterwauls turn to shrieks as the sandbox gang disbands.

Katie gazes at the beast, its siblings scattering over the sand. Childless at last, the spider is still, rooted in its fear.

Katies smiles.

“Along came a spider… that sat down beside her,” she whispers.

I’m not afraid of you.

Originally published in MagMyr, Volume VI, 2000.
© by Cathrene Gehue, 2000