After 20 years, my wife finally allowed me to tell this story.

Like all good scary stories, this one begins with a testicle self-examination. Or, as its colloquially known: jerking off. It was my last day in Guatemala and I was sitting in the hotel, waiting to go to the airport, and abusing myself to help pass the time. Things were going as well as could be expected. Until they weren’t. My left middle finger brushed against a lump on my right testicle. My erection wilted like a primrose at Chernobyl.

I did a cursory examination, hoping it might be an ingrown hair. But I knew it wasn’t. It didn’t have the itchy pain of an ingrown hair. No pain at all, actually. It had all the telltale signs of a growth I absolutely did not want anywhere on my body, especially not on my balls. Within 20 minutes, I’d cancelled my flight, phoned Renee to tell her the flight was delayed, and called an emergency clinic to tell them I was on my way.

Fast forward eight hours. Interesting fact about Guatemala: great medical care! I was examined, given an ultrasound, and told, to my enormous relief, the growth was benign. Just a cluster of fatty deposits. It’d go away on its own in a few weeks. I was on the next flight home.

I got back to my house around 10pm. It’d been almost two months since I saw my wife. Needless to say, we were both happy to see each other. I took a shower, scrubbed out the nooks and crannies, and did a bit of manscaping. The lump that had caused me so much stress only 24 hours earlier had already started to dissipate. There was a pretty good chance Renee wouldn’t even notice. I finished the process of making myself smell moderately fuckable, dried off, and headed into the bedroom.

Renee was waiting for me on the bed. I could tell when I got home that there was a decent chance we’d be having a bit of fun. And I was right. I’ll spare you the details, but it all went according to our tried-and-true routine: upper-front pinching, lower-front nibbling, lower-rear licking, mouth-to-mouth slobbering, and genitals-to-genitals docking. Four thrusts later and I was wheezing “sorry, it’s been a while” into her ear and collapsing on top of her.

I could tell Renee was stifling a laugh when she told me not to worry about it. I rolled off her and stared at the ceiling, panting like a chain-smoking Golden Retriever. While I watched the rotation of the ceiling fan and silently wished I didn’t have the refractory period of a glacier, I started to get itchy in a remarkably unpleasant spot. We’re all adults here, right? Okay, well, for lack of a better way of putting it, the tip of my dick felt like it was getting molested by a poison ivy plant. I started scratching, trying not to make too much of the irritation. Renee, of course, noticed immediately. She started giggling and began to ask “are you seriously jer…” Then she stopped and winced a little.

“You okay?,” I inquired, doing my best to wipe our combined goo off my hand without my wife noticing I was wiping it on her side of the bed. “Yeah,” she told me. “Just dry skin or something. You almost ready for round two?”

“Sure,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “I’ll be right back.”

I got up and stumbled my way through the dark bedroom into the bathroom to hopefully pee away the growing discomfort. Once in the bathroom, I stood in front of the toilet, mildly disturbed by the way the dim glow of the night light cast a shadow on the wall and made it look like I had a truly spectacular pair of breasts. Peeing helped the itching go away – for a second or two. Then it came back with a vengeance; not just on the tip, but all over the area. I gritted my teeth and leaned over to turn on the light. Then I screamed.

A sea of tiny, brown spiders swarmed over my penis, the front of my testicles, and my left hand that’d been holding on while I peed. I screamed again and squeezed myself, crushing the tiny things in my fist and pulling them away from me. Renee, who’d leapt from the bed after my first shriek, saw what was happening and gasped. I looked at her crotch and almost passed out. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of the things were leaking out of her and cascading down her right thigh. She hadn’t noticed yet.

Pain, now, not just itching, exploded from my urethra as another wave of the arachnids pushed themselves out of me; their journey no longer aided by the lubrication that had eased the passage of the first group. Renee finally discovered her own condition and split my ears with a shriek I was certain would’ve shattered the windows. She reached in with her fingers and pulled globs of writhing baby spiders, still trapped in the sticky confines of what I’d left following my profoundly disappointing attempt at sexual intercourse.

I jumped into the freezing cold shower and tried to aim a needle of the shower water into the spot where the baby spiders kept pouring from. Renee ran out of the bathroom but I didn’t follow. I had my own problems. Gradually, over the course of a couple minutes, the spiders stopped coming out. I turned off the water and ran to find my wife. All I had to do was follow the drops of semen-trapped baby spiders. I found Renee in the kitchen, her right leg up on the counter, attempting to dredge the remaining creatures from her anatomy with the hose next to the sink. She glared at me. The floor was soaked, but I figured it wasn’t a good time for me to tell her that. She probably knew.

I offered to help, but she just told me to leave her alone. Another few spiders crawled out of my tiny, flaccid penis. I asked if she was sure. She told me she was.

An hour later, after the last of the arachnids were purged from our respective anatomies, we got in the car and went to the hospital. Renee wasn’t very happy. It was a pretty long ride and we sat in silence, doing our best to forget what had happened. We weren’t very successful. I felt terrible and tried to add some levity to the situation. “So, um, remember when all those spiders came out of my dick?,” I asked, and nudged her. She snorted out an unexpected laugh and just said, “I fucking hate you right now.”

We left the hospital after 12 hours of ultrasounds, X-rays, and hundreds of questions from every doctor in the place. Apparently a spider egg cluster can look just like a fatty deposit on an old ultrasound. The same old ultrasounds they used in Guatemala. No one could explain exactly how the spider egg had gotten there, but the doctors said weirder things have happened. Neither of us were particularly comforted by that fact.

After we each got a clean bill of health and five free bouquets of flowers from the hospital florist, who told us every single person who worked at the hospital knew about what had happened, we went home. And that was that. We were finding cobwebs all over the house for almost ten years after, though. Memories.

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