Shepard: Every time my best friend backs out of her driveway, she is sure she is going to run over her cat.  She fears she won’t realize she’s done this.  Hours later, she will return home to discover her cat’s lifeless body, flattened into her tire tracks.  
    She would like to buy her nephew a house, but she is afraid that he will burn it down and die in the fire.
    When she hires a catsitter, she is afraid that the sitter will be raped, tortured and killed by a psychopathic intruder.   
    I, on the other hand, am afraid of having my belly button touched.  
    This is one of the differences between us.  
    When I told her about this assignment, I said, “I’m supposed to write about an irrational fear.  But I don’t have any irrational fears, right?”  She was silent.  “Do I?” I insisted.  “I’m not forgetting something, right?  I just don’t have them.”  She told me to shut up.
    But it is true that if my small children, crawling all over me, get close to touching my belly button, I shudder.  I’m not worried about the casual, brush touch.  But that’s a precursor to the firm intrusion I am worried about, the way the bad guys in the movies let you know what’s coming next by brushing the blade of their knives gently against their victims’ throats.

Shteyngart: I have an irrational fear of giant flying insects, such as the American water bug.


––What was the genesis of this fear?

Evenson: Probably I was told frequently in childhood that raw chicken carried disease, but I was told the same thing about pork, for instance, and am not afraid of pork, which is what makes me think the fear is highly irrational.  And I don’t have the same fear or reluctance with, say, boneless chicken breasts.  It’s something specific to the relation of the bone to the chicken.  It has something to do with the way the bone itself looks and with the weird blueness you sometimes get around the joint and the way there’s always a particularly disgusting vein running along the bone and the way the blood girdles the bone.  It may also have to do with my mother cooking a lot of teriyaki chicken when I was growing up and with my suspicion that she never cooked it long enough.

Grossman: I could go on and on. The current thinking is that phobias are a kind of hybrid phenomenon––they’re fundamentally a neurological problem, straight-up lousy cerebral wiring, but they do also have meanings associated with them. There’s some kind of symbolic payload on board. I’m pretty sure mine has to do with my family. More than that I don’t want to say, and you probably wouldn’t want to hear.

McCracken: As far as I can remember, I was an ordinary child, able to watch Pepe Le Pew cartoons without breaking a sweat.  (This is not true of cartoons that threatened cannibalism.  You know the kind: desert island, mask-wearing natives, big iron pot—where did that iron pot come from, huh?—Bugs Bunny up to his waist while the chief mask-wearing native slices carrots into the broth.)  But one summer I rented an apartment in Provincetown, a place I’d always experienced as skunk-free, and the town was crawling with them.  Someone explained to me that a virus had wiped out the Cape Cod skunk population some years before this.  Now the skunks were returning.  I wish I could have found some romance in the notion, but instead I was scared stiff.  One late night I looked out at the backyard and saw a dozen skunks and wondered whether I would be able to walk around Provincetown at night again.  I hate skunks for the same reason I hate haunted houses: I cannot bear the feeling of wondering whether I am about to be startled.  Skunks seemed horrifically unpredictable to me.  My fear was made worse by all the skunk facts people passed along.  Skunks, I was told, were hard of hearing, and nervous, and your best defense against them was clapping in a rhythmic, warning way.  Also, they did not like the smell of dirty socks.  Also, if you had been sprayed, the solution was not the fabled tomato juice, but boxed douche, like Massengill.  I had a diptych vision of myself.  Before: clapping, eyes darting, a gray garland of filthy tube socks around my neck.  Afterwards: pulsating with stink marks at the Provincetown A & P, my little plastic shopping basket heaped up with boxes of douche.