From early light, when the sun’s first rays caught the jewelled dew on each gossamer thread, she spun. But come the afternoon, beneath a bank of onrushing thunderheads, a gale blew fierce, destroying her intricate weave. Still, once the storm died away, with neither sorrow nor rancor, she began anew.

Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent. In addition to 50-Word Stories, his writing has appeared in more than two dozen publications including the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Garfield Lake Review, Fiction on the Web, Bookends Review, Sandpiper, the San Antonio Review, The Best of CaféLit 11 and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies. He lives outside Chicago.