By Tom Gartner

Alma hated shrink-wrap. It made her think of suffocation, of all the warnings she’d ever read on plastic bags, of all the horror movies she’d seen where the eyes of B actors went hazy as they struggled for breath. She would dream, sometimes, that she was drowning, gazing up through twenty feet of translucent jade at the unreachable air. She would wake to find that she’d been pressing her pillow to her face.

As her breath came back, as she puckered her lips to force air out of her lungs so more could come in, she would flee her bed. But in the kitchen, the gleaming clarity of the knives hanging on the wall would bring on images of mutilation, of evisceration.

In the bathroom, the steady concussion of water drops on porcelain swelled in her imagination to a Niagara-like roar that slowly rose until it threatened to close over her head. In the living room, the picture window seemed to summon her out into the darkness, where a void opened below the narrow deck.

For a time, Alma found comfort only in the coat closet, with all her coats and sweaters torn from their hangers and wrapped around her like a protective cocoon. If she heard a whisper in the fabric’s rustling that she could strangle on a sleeve, it was only a whisper.

But her scars had healed and faded, so much so that she was sometimes surprised to find the small dark patches of faded tissue on her torso. The seizures had stopped entirely, and her vision had cleared. She tried to be grateful: it was a gift of sorts, she knew, that imaginary fears had taken the place of real ones.

She could see now that a process had started, that if she gave herself to it those fears would drop away too. Her strength would come back, her will would harden, and the people who’d made her suffer would taste fear themselves. Those fears would be real enough, and she would make sure they came true.

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Tom Gartner’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including The Madison Review, California Quarterly, Kestrel, and Twelve Winters. Other work is forthcoming in Third Coast. One story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives just north of the Golden Gate and works as a buyer for an independent bookstore in San Francisco.