Modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio's classic from the 14th Century, this collection similarly brought 100+ short stories to Wattpad readers. The original's premise was simple: ten individuals entertained themselves over a span of ten days by telling a...
The evening Erin Kadi was born, an unexpected meteor shower burned dazzling paths through the sky. His mother watched the cosmic light-show through the hospital window as shooting star after shooting star destroyed itself on the earth's atmosphere. Erin, his mother was fond of saying, had been born under a lucky star.
Despite the celestial connection to his birth, Erin spent most of his young life looking down. He wasn't ashamed, embarrassed, or self-conscious. He didn't look down to avoid the gazes of others. Erin looked down as he walked so that he might more easily spot the tiny creatures that held his imagination in thrall. Spiders were his favorite, but he had a love for all of the creepy, spindly, hairy, vermin that most people found repugnant. As a child, he captured, collected, and archived his subjects, especially the arachnids.
One night, during his sixth year of life, he awoke from fearful dreams. Buzzing, flying creatures descended from the dark sky to carry him away. No amount of comforting from his mother could help him shake the terrible residue of dread left behind by his nightmare. She sat with him into the night until he finally dozed off, leaving his bedside lamp on when she retired. While he slept, a spider climbed to the top his lampshade and build an elaborate network of silk strands. The web cast a shadowy net across his ceiling, and when he awoke to see it, he was comforted by it. Erin was certain that no flying beasts from his dream would be able to penetrate the protective spans of shadow-webs.
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On the occasion of his eighth birthday, he convinced his mother to let him keep a number of orb spiders in a special habitat he had created for them.
"You can't keep spiders in a cage," his mother had said. And she was, of course, quite right. The orb spiders escaped their confines and made new homes in Erin's bedroom while he slept. Much to his delight, he awoke to this discovery, finding himself in the midst of a beautiful architectural masterpiece of spun silk, still inhabited by its brightly colored, eight-legged craftsmen. His delight was not shared by the members of his household. (His sister Clarabelle would scream at the site of them.)
At age nine, he discovered the nest of a Black Widow spider, and promptly captured the lovely lady in a Mason jar. His mother celebrated this trophy in a way that changed Erin's life. She bought him a camera.
Erin abandoned his collections of brittle, dusty, poorly-preserved spider corpses in favor of collecting their images in crystal-clear, vibrant, Hi-Def videos and pictures. These he narrated with interesting facts and specific information about the discovery of each specimen. When complete, he uploaded the files to his blog so the entire world could appreciate their enchanting beauty.
A few years and a couple of cameras later, Erin's skill as a photographer and vlogger had garnered several thousand followers, including a budding young Brazilian entomologist named Rodrigo Castilla. Erin and Rodrigo were about the same age, and shared the same interest in arachnida. Their commonalities were the foundation of a fast bond of friendship. They encouraged and pushed each other to record the rarest and most beautiful spiders in their geographic regions. They helped each other research and track down the locations of every type of arachnid. It wasn't long before Erin's images and videos attracted the attention of wildlife publications and professional producers, giving him a modest income to fund his endeavors.
