As a writer, I’m always looking for that next story – the one where art imitates life. It doesn’t come around often and the reverse is even less frequent.
Such was not the case last night as my wife and I lay in bed…
To begin with, I am terrified of spiders. I’ve had a couple of incidents that have left me scarred with regard to those certain creepy-crawlies.
There happened to be a rather large spider on the wall and I pointed it out to her. She got up and with tissue in hand, and much to my relief, dispatched the thing post-haste.
Crawling back in bed, she picked up the book she’s reading titled, ‘The Friend Zone,’ by Abby Jimenez. No sooner had she settled in, picked up where she’d left off, then she began laughing.
“What?” I asked, thinking she was laughing at my silliness.
“Listen,” she answered as she began to read aloud from Chapter Nine:
She stood in the hall in her curlers, wringing her hands, with Stuntman Mike at her feet looking up at me. I thought for a second she’d seen someone in the yard and had come to tell me.
“What?” I asked.
“Josh? Can you come to my room?”
My wolfish grin broke some of the tension of her face.
“Oh, stop. There’s a spider. I need you to kill it. Please. Before it disappears and I have to burn my whole house down.”
I laughed. “Should I get my gun or…?”
She bounced nervously. “Josh, I’m serious. I hate them. Please help me.”
I pulled a few tissues from the box on my nightstand.”
Anyone who knows me, knows that I once in complete panic, used an M-15, on full-auto, to kill a Banana Spider that I’d knocked from my face after I fell asleep. While that was no laughing matter, my wife and I had a good laugh at the obvious parallels between what had jus’ happened and the storyline in her book.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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