The Shop That Bought Fears

Ilka had been afraid of water for as long as she could remember. It was an inconvenient fear for a fisherman's daughter in a port city where everything, sooner or later, came down to the sea. Her father had long hoped that she would one day work the boat with him. So on the first Tuesday of winter, when she noticed a hand-painted sign in the alley behind the fish market (FEARS BOUGHT. FAIR PRICES.), she went in before she could change her mind.

The shop was so narrow that she could touch both walls at once. Behind the counter, rows of small glass jars held something that drifted like smoke: gray in most of them, green in a few, an angry violet in one. Mr. Thistlewood, a thin man with ink-stained fingers, listened to her without the slightest surprise. "Water," he said. "A common one, but a strong one. Three silver coins, and you'll never have to think about it again." She took the coins. As he sealed the jar, she felt nothing at all, except perhaps a little lighter.

For a week it was wonderful. She went out on her father's boat and laughed at the waves that had once kept her awake at night. She swam off the harbor wall in water so cold that the dockworkers shouted at her to get out.

On the second Tuesday, the sky turned the color of a bruise and every boat in the harbor stayed tied up. Ilka looked at the same black water that had frightened her all her life, saw nothing whatsoever to worry about, and rowed out alone to check her father's nets. She didn't notice the wind rising. She didn't notice the waves growing until one of them broke over the side and filled the boat to her knees. It was only when a fisherman dragged her onto the harbor steps, shouting at her, that she understood what she had sold. It had not been her fear of water. It had been her ability to tell when the water wanted to kill her.

On the third Tuesday she went back. Mr. Thistlewood didn't seem surprised to see her either. "Buying back costs more than selling," he said. "Fears grow in the jar. I don't want your coins. I want a memory: a happy one, the best you have."

Had he asked for anything else, she might have argued. Instead, she thought of the summer she was seven, of a long evening on the beach with her grandmother, eating plums, the sand still warm under their feet, and she nodded. He touched her forehead with one inky finger, and the jar on the counter went dark.

She walked home with the fear back in her chest, heavy and familiar, and she was glad of it. On the harbor wall she stopped and tried to remember the summer she was seven. She knew there had been a beach, and someone she loved, and something sweet. That was all. Below her, the sea moved, gray and cold, and for the first time in two weeks it frightened her, exactly as much as it should.