I don't like spiders.

I don't like it when they bunched themselves up so their legs look like tangled wires.

I don't like it when they spread themselves out like the radio spokes on a wheel.

It was bad luck that when I met my wife, we discovered we were both scared of them.

As the man, I just kind of wound up taking over spider killing duty.

At first this meant squealing or trying to lob a shoe at one of them from a distance.

But as the years went on, I kind of just got tired of the stress and anxiety. Fear is exhausting, so is the pageantry

of it, jumping up and shouting and lots of running around. Over time, I found myself having less and

less of a fear reaction to them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want one crawling on my face,

but it wasn't like they had me running away in fear every time.

Lily was never great with them either,

but it wasn't what I call worthy of therapy.

For the first ten years I knew her, she was a fairly run-of-the-mill arachnophob.

Things only got bad after this one night when we just come back in from an evening with

friends.

There'd been a storm outside, windy as hell.

I remember putting the keys down on the table by the door, and when I

looked back, she was pulling down the hood of her coat. She led out a sigh, ran her hands through her

hair, and she looked a little puzzled by what she felt. When she lifted her hand away,

there were thin black legs poking out from between her fingers. It took a second for her to react to what was all bunched up inside a cuped hand. Then she screamed

and threw it onto the ground. I saw it for only a second. It was so fast. Then it was off,

under the nearest door, and my number one concern became comforting my wife, who was having

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