Describe a Fear

Teacher Write 

Describe a fear you had when you were the same age as the protagonist in your work-in-progress.
Can you remember the first time you had this fear? Picture yourself in that moment and capture
the setting and your surroundings. Did you feel pressure to try something you didn't want to?
Were you worried about a pet or family member? Were you afraid of the dark, or something in
the closet or under your bed? To go to school for the first time? To have a babysitter? To speak
up for yourself? To ask someone out? Try to capture all the sensations and details you can remember.

As Claire watched the spider crawl away, a memory bubbled up to the surface in her mind. She was
only four when her family moved to the farmhouse in Idaho. A neighbor came by with a plate of
cookies to welcome them to their new surroundings. She told her mother right away to purchase
sticky traps for the brown recluse because this time of the year was when they were mating. These
spiders like to hide in clothes lying on the floor, shoes, or climb up a bed skirt, but they usually leave
humans alone unless they get caught while while putting on a shoe or whatnot. Mother purchased
some sticky traps, and the next morning, there were four spiders on the sticky trap in the kitchen,
not even dead, but wriggling around! That sticky trap with the giant spiders on it made her so scared
that she became fanatical about her shoes, her clothes, and making her bed which had no bed
skirt. She would pull down the covers at night, and look for any hidden in the folds of the sheets.

What her mother didn’t know was that if you didn’t kill them on the sticky trap, they can sometimes
crawl off! Those darn brown recluse can lose one or two of their legs and work themselves off.  After
a month or two of learning the ins and outs of this Houdini spider, her brother, and her sister were not
scared to stomp on the sticky trap, but Claire stayed clear away of it. She would not even look at it,
for it gave her nightmares.