Arachnaphobia

          Age Four.  One of my earliest memories.  I am sitting near our front door playing with a plastic baseball bat and ball.  I notice something funny-looking and sleekly black poking its feet out of a small crack in the wooden door.  Curious, I prod the silly little animal with my toy; a black widow emerges and grapples onto the plastic bat.  I look at it in curiosity as it slowly creeps closer and closer down the handle towards my body.  I giggle as it gets dangerously close, wondering if all those feet will tickle the skin on my hand.  My father notices and, yelling, rushes over to knock the bat out of my startled hands.  As it rolls across the floor, the widow is thrown off and, before it can make its way back to the lair, my father's shoe makes sure I will never be threatened by the creature again.  He takes me aside and in shaken tones informs me that the animal I saw was called a "spider" and that if it bit me, I could have been poisoned and hurt and could very likely have died.  Horrified, my four-year-old mind reaches one conclusion: if it crawls and has eight legs, it will kill you.
          Age Four.  I wake up and get out of my bed.  The sun is shining gloriously through the window; yawning, I shuffle over to my nightlight to snap it off.  Feeling something on my hand, I bring it up to my face; a small brown spider is clinging to my finger.  My eyes widen and a scream hangs in my throat for a few seconds before it erupts from my mouth.  I swing my hand into the wall with as much force as a human toddler is capable of summoning; the fiend is crushed, and a bruise colors my knuckle for nearly two weeks.
          Age Five.  My two cousins and I scuttle away during Thanksgiving dinner to go explore Grandpa's forbidden, abandoned old barn.  We throw ourselves into moldy hay for no other reason than that we can, pick up ancient rakes and pitchforks with sighs of wonder, and dare each other to climb the rotting ladder into the attic.  One cousin, delirious in his rule-breaking, kicks a rusty old bucket over.  Inside, we see a mass of webbing and no less than ten spiders, furious at being disturbed.  My mind freezes up, and the next thing I know, I'm being comforted by my mother, who soothes me out of my fearful tears.  I have a difficult time falling asleep that night.
          Age Five.  My Grandma gives me a big book with all kinds of information on bugs of every sort imaginable.  Fascinated, I devour every morsel the book has to give me, except the spider section.  After skipping the twenty-two pages on arachnids for two months, I accidentally drop the book.  When I pick it up, the face of a wolf spider is staring at me from a massive half-page photo.  I blanch with fear, but read the caption.  Captivated, I cave in and read all twenty-two pages in a marathon of wonderment.  I learn terrible, brilliant truths about spiders that alarm me even more, but at the same time discover a newfound glory and beauty to them.  Entranced, I stare at a masterful photo of a dew-covered web with a black widow perched on it; a mother, she guards her young with a twisted love that terrifies and excites me.  I decide that maybe spiders aren't so bad, so long as they understand that any one I ever see in real life has to die.
          Age Six.  We move into a new house.  While my father is introducing himself to the new neighbors across the street, I explore my new lair.  My prowlings are interrupted when I spy a swollen black widow scaling the bricks of the wall in an alarming fashion.  This creature cannot be allowed to exist in the same house as I.  I scream for my dad, who takes his sweet time crossing the street.  By the time he shows up, the monster has escaped.  Nearly to tears, I berate him for allowing it to roam free.  He patiently hears me out and calmly explains that God put more creatures than just humans on the earth and that if I will just leave the poor widow alone she won't bug me.  I listen to him with no small degree of shock and wonder if he is insane.
          Age Eight.  My three-year-old brother wakes up to find ants in his candy and becomes convinced that they are invading his room with the sole intent of murdering him in his sleep.  When he refuses to believe my parents, they rely on his awareness that I obsessively study insect life and have me tell him that the ants where we live could never hope of killing a human being.  Calmed, he allows himself to be put to bed.  I wonder how he could ever let something as silly as tiny little ants drive him to such paranoia.
          Age Nine.  While watering the small garden we keep out back, I notice two insects engaging in furious combat.  Curious, I creep closer, and see the tiniest little web I ever imagined, spun by the smallest, most juvenile black widow I'd ever seen.  Caught in the baby';s web was a full-grown hornet; the spider kept rushing forward to sedate his prey, but the wasp thrashed dangerously; I wonder how a simple animal like a hornet can keep a black widow at bay in his own home, and realize that the winged insect is an adult, while the spider is a kid like me.  Fascinated, I watch the tug-of-war for minutes; the hornet is unable to free itself, but the widow cannot get close enough.  Finally, to my horror, the wasp gets a lucky shot; its stinger impales the spider, which retreats slowly into a corner and dies.  The fight done, I return to my duties; as I continue tending the garden, the thought crosses my head that I could free the hornet from the web, lest it die of starvation, but I dismiss the idea; the least I could do for an arachnid of such spunk was ensure its murderer died as well.
          Age Nine.  Calculating observation has uncovered that there are no less than three separate spiders living in my room.  When I inform my mother, she expresses surprise that I have allowed them to live.  I brag that I maintain a policy of détente with the trio; I benevolently allow them to keep their lives, and they patrol my room when I am away and keep it clear of any unwanted pests such as cockroaches and ants.  (In reality, I am simply too slow and too cautious to ever hope of catching the little bastards.)  Over the next couple of months, I find to my astonishment that my lie has become truth; my room, once a haven for vermin of all sorts, now has only three guests that are unwanted.
          Age Ten.  My mother shows us a surprise; a tarantula she caught in our backyard.  Trapped in an empty jar, I am doomed to be its master forever.  My mother, knowing my impressive knowledge of all things insect, asks what we should feed the creature.  Well aware that nearly any of the numerous grasshoppers, caterpillars, or pillbugs to be found in the lawn could easily sustain the monster, I answer that we should feed it ants and only ants.  A week into this treatment, the spider is clearly dying of starvation.  Though this was my original plan, but as I sit there watching the poor animal desperately try to free itself from the glass prison, wishing helplessly for any scrap of sustenance, I find that the satisfaction I anticipated is not present.  The next day, after a scary dream in which I am trapped in a room with no way out, I beg my mother to let me release the poor animal.  She agrees, and drives me nearly twelve miles across town, where I open the jar and send the furry little monster scurrying across the grass to revel in freedom once more.  As we return home, I feel a strange compulsion to cry.
          Age Ten.  We visit my cousin's house.  As we converse, I notice a truly colossal jar perched on top of the refrigerator; thick webbing shrouds the jar's interior almost perfectly, though I notice a few dark, misshapen lumps.  Drawing closer, I realize one of the lumps is the fattest, most massive black widow I have ever seen in my life, and the others are raw meat.  My cousin explains with no hidden level of disgust that her husband caught the beast and put it in that jar.  When I inquire about the meat, she explains that rather than catch insects, her husband simply drops portions of meat inside, which the spider drains of blood much like it would juice from a sedated insect.  It apparently works very well, for the spider sits there reveling in its fatness, waiting for the next piece of bloody heaven to gorge on.  I observe it with fascination.  That evening, I have a very strange dream about a vampire with eight legs.
          Age Eleven.  I am stalking about our backyard, playing an imaginary game.  Walking between two apple trees, I suddenly am caught in a sticky, nearly invisible web that massively stretches from tree to tree and envelops me from my head to my navel.  Screaming in fear, heart pounding, I twist and writhe, my arms desperately trying to claw off the strands that cover my face and shoulders.  As my head swivels, I catch a glimpse of something over my shoulder; the strand that the mastermind chose to perch on was caught on my collar, and my eyes saw him crawling slowly, threateningly towards me with lethal deliberation.  Losing all rationality, I run for my life, screaming; the strand with the spider on it is still caught on my shirt, and as I pull him along, the spider desperately clings to his silk for dear life.  Looking over my shoulder once more, I see the hated thing levitating and chasing me at my own speed.  Eventually, the spider lets go or is thrown off, and I collapse, chest heaving, close to tears.  I run inside, strip off my shirt, and throw it in the garbage can.  I have nightmares about the incident for weeks; I dare not draw near the apple trees for months.
          Age Eleven.  My father tells me to mow the back lawn; I am forced to approach the hated apple trees.  Looking closely, I can see the web, rebuilt, strung between the behemoths.  Desperately, I search for the demon of my nightmares, finally noticing him clinging to one of the trunks.  It is him, all right, but he is bigger, fatter, and more nasty-looking than ever.  The eight eyes stare at me unblinkingly; I wonder if he remembers me like I remember him.  I suppress my first instinct to run and ram the tree with the lawnmower until he is flung from the safety of the trunk down onto the grass.  I instantly run him over with the blade; pulling back the mower reveals a small patch of tan-colored goop.  Smiling and whooping, I run to the shed and creep back with a shovel, with which I hack the dead one's web to pieces gleefully.
          Age Eleven.  My leg hurts.  Examination reveals what at first appears to be a massive, nasty-colored bruise, until the small protrusion with two little punctures in the center becomes apparent.  I gulp.  Spiderbite.  I show my mother and she tells me I'll be fine; the next day it hurts more and the colored patch of skin has gotten bigger.  She takes me to see the doctor; he runs tests and clearly marks the area to note its progress.  The following day we return to the office; the swelling has almost doubled.  The doctor whispers strange things to my mother and gives her a disgusting medicine that I have to take for a month.  For nearly a week the swelling and pain gets worse until I am almost forced to walk with a limp.  Finally, it stops getting bigger, and over another week it slowly recedes until finally all physical traces of the ordeal are gone for good.  My mother proudly tells me that I have nothing to fear of spiders now, and that I bested the worst they had to give me.  I nod my agreement, but fail to mention the near-constant nightmares.
          Age Twelve.  A good friend of my mother is sent to the hospital.  I ask what's wrong with her, and my mother tells me that Mrs. Brown somehow antagonized a black widow when she was sleeping, and it bit her eight separate times.  The venom is so powerful that she has been delirious since the attack and her heart nearly failed on two occasions.  She stays in the hospital for three weeks before being released.  During that period Mrs. Brown's son comes over to our house for dinner; afterwards, we watch a movie, and he tearfully confides in me that he overheard the doctors say that his mom might die.  That night I pray to God to please kill every spider on the planet.
          Age Fourteen.  I am at a friend's house playing video games with him and his brothers.  Looking over at his older brother, a cocky eighteen-year-old who beats me at everything, I notice something moving on his hand; I realize it is a spider.  Yelping, I point out the danger to him, but the aged kid simply picks the squirming thing up with two pinched fingers and examines it with a smirk.  Noticing my the hesitation and fascination on my face, he discovers a moment of evil and flicks the spider in my direction; it lands on my shirt.  Squealing, I beat my chest as the spider crawls around in a panic.  Finally, squashed, the spider stains the cloth as I leer murder at my friend's brother.  "What"s the matter," he says between laughs, "not afraid of spiders, are you?"
          Age Fifteen.  When reading in the den, I hear my sister give a loud shriek from the living room.  Dashing in, I see her pointing at a lamp; looking, I see behind the lampshade the silhouette of a spider that must have been the size of a poodle.  I tense up and make a choking sound before her laughter gives it away; it is a plush toy she hid for the purpose of pranking me.  Still chortling, she ignores my condemnations, and I stalk back to the den, trying to stop the shivers still paralyzing my spine.
          Age Seventeen.  My father orders me to clean the window well outside my room, which I have not done in months.  Grumbling, I descend into the well, only to have my shin suddenly strangled by hitherto unseen webbing.  I try to free myself, but notice innumerable dark shapes stalking the wall of the well; it is the nesting ground for dozens of black widows.  I climb up out of the well in a hurry and run inside at a speed faster than I have ever gone before. I scurry up to the toilet and throw up; it is quite possibly the most frightened I have ever been in my life.
          Last Week.  My brother and I sit on my bed watching a movie on my television when he gets up and dances around, grappling at himself and shrieking.  A tiny, worthless little spider falls to the floor to my surprise.  It hurriedly crawls to a crack where we can't get to it as I try to calm my sibling.  Though not bitten, the lad is shaken, and he points out that that thing was living in my bed.  I laugh it off, mocking his stupid-looking dance, and pointing out that a tiny little thing like that was unlikely to cause harm to a kitten, let alone a human being.  He eventually starts laughing too, shaking his head at his foolish fright.  We both go back to watching our movie with smiles on our faces.
          I sleep on the couch that night.