Look, I could easily have hidden in a wall somewhere until this thing blew over, but I came here today to tell my side. Now I know what they say, that I was taking advantage of a minor, exploiting him for my own financial gains. Well, I guess I was showing off a little, but not that much, not the first time, anyway. I might have enjoyed it, too, the poetry of it, the sheer audacity and elegance of it, if it had gone as planned. Like Frieca, I’d be saying, “Na-na-na-na-na,” now, and actually mean it. But things didn’t actually go like clockwork, not like you think, anyway. And contrary to popular opinion, I wasn’t just trying to make a buck off the poor orphan by using his situation and my writing skills to make the whole world see his poor, pitiful case in bright, shiny letters. Well, to be truthful, my writing and weaving skills. Weaving is big in my family. Our warp and woof, so to speak. It’s how we normally make ends meet. Oh lord, a pun! I’m so sorry.

But anyway, believe me. I honestly do have some compunctions about using others’ pain to make a buck at their expense, and it wouldn’t cross my mind. I mean I simply would not do that. I’m way too genteel. So today, I hope to make you see that although I really was aiming for a very public reaction to occur and though all that attention we garnered was indeed quite welcome, even necessary, as it turned out, for the good of all concerned, the subsequent offers of exalted advertising positions were just that. Subsequent. Not schemed for. Not even expected or hoped for. I mean even though I am now working with a highly reputable advertising firm in New York at an even higher yearly remuneration, that wasn’t the initial goal of my carefully crafted work. Far from it.

Nor, to tell the truth, was the goal to save the idiot pig. I mean, come on. Pigs live to get made into bacon and sausage daily, hourly. It does seem to be their pitiful lot in life to provide us with high fat and sodium content offerings of this type. Let’s face it. It’s really all they’re good for, unless they’re good breeders, and this little piggy definitely wasn’t one.

Who did he think he was, anyway, wanting to live forever?

Like if he lived to old age, he could provide wool or milk or transport for the family like the other animals who stayed on for years? Right. But the truth was that all he ever really produced in that sty was manure and bad jokes. “Knock-knock” this and “the rabbi and the priest” that. Polacks and Russkis coming out our ears. We all took turns being bored to tears or raging on the warpath to stomp on him. Even Fern was disgusted and raged off a few times. But Lurvy’d fixed the fence so the rest of them couldn’t escape. And I, well, my balloon broke.

I guess I could have hit the road on my own, but my sisters wouldn’t budge, and I needed them. But more on that later. The day the blond arachnid jokes started, my migraines kicked up and so did horrid nightmares where I took a knife and completed the abattoir job myself. One little thrust up the windpipe with a hay claw and… you get the idea. As far as I could tell, the whole reason for Little Porky’s whiny, “walk-into-a-bar” existence was as a rudimentary garbage disposal, and he couldn’t even finish that task. Templeton had to help him.

So you see, the real reason for my actions was fairly simple. From the moment Fern stood up to her father on that farm, the moment she asked what he was going to do with that ax, all my arachnid relatives on the Arable farm spoke of her in hushed tones and she became our little mini-goddess. Our fervent worship of her actions led to a great spiritual energy that consumed us until it was unthinkable that we do anything other than to speak out, in the only way we knew, with our voices on the web.

Oh, you don’t think I did all that website work myself, do you? Good grief, no. I’m sure that my work was considered miraculous at the time partly due to its speed, but let me tell you, between us and the wallboards, that three of my sisters helped me that night. Of course, we’d had to rethink our original idea some. A lot, actually. A huge rewrite, a giant revision. See, if I’d had my way, our first message would have been shining on the front door of the Arable house in about April. But Leucania’s stupid idea to meet in the new crate for secrecy about that time changed all that. It just happened that we were having a very serious meeting of our secret female society when we got caught up in the crate with the stinky little ham when he got moved to the Zuckerman’s farm. You don’t think we would have suffered that little pork rind otherwise, do you? We were just so excited and intent on our anarchistic meeting goals in our upper left corner of the box that day that we thought it was the spirit moving us when really we were getting loaded into the truck.

Then it was too late. When we got to the other farm, we found out that big fat Zuckerman woman was a housekeeping terror. She never let a web stand for even ten hours. So we had to rearrange everything and create our masterpiece in the damned barn doorway. A miserable place from which to start a movement, let me tell you. But I wasn’t to be deterred, and I pressed on, though my sisters were all for letting the idea slide in the dim light of the place. I had to work for months to find just the right place to stage our gigs, and we had to look up words and spellings and alphabet nonsense. It was really tough. You get the picture.

And here’s where I get to my main point. As it turned out, what ended up on the barn doorway that wondrous shining morning for Lurvy to read wasn’t even my message. As to the spelling, I’m sorry to have to admit that Leucania was the good speller. And the handiwork was mostly that of Frieca and Clavia, who helped me execute the thing while Leucania crawled over and edited our work from a distance, watching for messy workmanship and stray strands. I’d been so busy all day guarding that corner of the doorway against incursions from that retarded Avery child. So when I went off exhausted for a little nap in the middle of the night, my “Women Unite” slogan somehow (I’m still investigating this) got transmuted, losing letters on the ends of words with some substitutions in really bad penmanship to become “Some Pig“.

Can you believe that? “Some Fricking Pig?” The sun had risen and the alarm sounded by the family before I saw those words. Then all I remember is a hollow, resounding feeling in my gut where the spinning thread usually resides. I was bone dry. Couldn’t muster a wisp of silk. I was so utterly furious that my brave feminist message to the world had been permutated and reinterpreted, I mean rudely boiled down to a marketing ploy to save an irritating, presumptuous, chubby male oinker. Not even a female. I could have just spat. I probably did. But Frieca was laughing her head off and wouldn’t help me, and Leucania and Clavia had disappeared. And me without a thread to write with.

My theory now is that Clavia, who was soft on the damned pig, just couldn’t resist his big, lazy sighs and his begging for mercy and she took pity on the dope. This theory is reinforced by the fact that she took off for parts unknown that night and the others wouldn’t talk, but I have no proof. All I know is that I’d worked so hard for so long on this derailed thing, and the crowds arrived before I found the energy or ammunition to go back and fix the damned message.

And then it was too late.

Then the “Save the Pig” thing took off, though I tried, I really tried, to change subsequent messages to something more in line with our cause. But “Terrific Fern, Leader of Women” got shortened to “Terrific.” I was so mad that the girls got started late and then got sloppy and made the letters too big. And “Radiant Ladies of the Farm,” well, you get the picture.

And that’s how our strong, multi-species women’s movement got pipped by a fricking pig.