It’s the Fourth Friday Challenge for October. My friend Paul and I, both posting daily in 2011, decided to give each other a job once a month to keep things spicy. In his words, “we want to push ourselves to do something more interesting than we might otherwise.”

I requested that his challenge be spooky, in keeping with the EEK!tober theme, and here it is:

What is the most embarrassing thing you are afraid of? You know, something that you have no business being bother by but that for some reason gives you the willies.

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I’ve touched on it here, and many friends have seen it up close — I have been clammily fearful of fish (and still am, sorta). Big fish, with big mouths; those sluggish ones you see in Chinese restaurant aquariums. And flounder. Oh my god, what is wrong with flounder?? They are so wrong in the most monstrous way.

The fear has gotten less as I’ve gotten older; I can swim in the ocean or other bodies of water without getting all panic-dog-paddly when I think about Unseen Creatures brushing by my legs. I still avoid eye contact with the big ones in the aquariums, and quickly away from anything flounder. I am uncomfortable stepping into murky water, no knowing where my toes are going.

This embarrasses me, this residual fear. I’m painfully aware of the irrational nature of this phobia (unlike my fear of razors, which has a basis in reality). I was in my thirties when I ran screaming down a street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, totally convinced a large live fish (which had flopped unexpectedly out of a tank) was chasing me.

So, it took me decades, but I did figure out a couple reasons why. One is a sad reason; there was a death of someone in my family due to drowning which likely propels the fear-of-unknown-water component. The  reason for the fear-of-fish component fits well into the Eek!tober theme:

I was about 9. My parents and I were visiting friends who had a cabin on the lake in Telluride, Colorado. The friends had a couple of kids where were a little older than me, and pretty high-intensity. My siblings were so much older they had already left home and my best friend recently moved away, so I was well on my way towards solitary only-child syndrome. I was not used to the raucous teasing and hazing of the kids I was dealing with that summer.

Noel, three years older, took me down to the lake in the afternoon. This was a very popular spot for fishing; the lake was alive with trout that would leap and cavort (?) in the early evenings.

We went wading, about knee deep, along the edge of the lake. It was very silty water; we could not see our feet. The surface on which we were walking was surprisingly soft.

After a while, Noel casually mentioned that this was the area in which the fishermen would clean their fish. I had no idea what that meant, so I asked.

“Oh, that means they cut the fishes’ heads off and pull out their guts,” she said. “See?”

At that, she started kicking and shuffling her feet, churning the bottom of the lake to the surface.

We had been walking on hundreds upon hundreds of fish heads and guts. Rotting, stinking offal.

Awful.

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Read Paul’s response to my challenge here [to come].