Psions - Beginnings

The bell above the door of Clásico Records gave its usual half-hearted jingle, and Owen Scott looked up from the crate of vinyl he’d been alphabetizing for the third time that week, not because it needed it, but because Tuesdays were slow, and that was better than melting away behind the counter.

“We’re open till six,” he called out, then immediately regretted it, because the person who’d walked in was just Ally from the bakery next door, holding a paper bag that smelled like yesterday’s bread.

“You say that to me every single time,” Ally said.

“It’s the first thing people ask.” Owen stood, wiped his hands on his jeans, and peered into the bag she held out. Two croissants, a little stale, still good. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this store since the Beatles.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.” She set a second, smaller bag on the counter, beside the register. “That one’s for Mr. Gomez. Tell him I said hi, and that he still owes me for the undercover bread operation here.”

“You bring him bread too?”

“I bring everybody bread, Owen. That’s the whole business model.” She smiled and headed for the door. “Behave yourself.”

He laughed, told her he always did, and let her go back out into the gray afternoon. The store settled into its usual quiet. The low hum of the record player behind the counter, spinning something warm and a little scratchy, boxes of other people’s old joy stacked all around him. It was, by most measures, not a good day. His car had made a noise that morning that cars weren’t supposed to make. His apartment’s radiator had opinions about when it wanted to work. His bank account had a number in it that he tried not to look at directly, like it was the sun.

None of that seemed to matter much once he was here, in a job that paid enough for rent and ramen if he was careful, working for a man who’d hired him two years ago on nothing but a good feeling and had never once made him regret it.

That was the part Owen came back to, some days, when things were tight. Somebody had looked at him broke, a little lost, fresh out of a college he hadn’t finished because money ran out and decided he was worth a chance anyway. It made the noise in the car easier to ignore.

He was halfway through convincing himself the Pop Girls section didn’t need reorganizing either when the front door slammed.

Not opened. Slammed- hard enough that the chimes shrieked instead of rang, hard enough that a stack of jewel cases by the register toppled and skittered across the counter.

Owen turned, expecting rain, expecting wind, expecting anything except what he actually saw: Mr. Gomez, striding through the store like the floor had personally wronged him. Bernardo Gomez was sixty-one years old and had never, in two years, moved faster than an amiable shuffle. He had a laugh that filled the whole shop. He remembered every regular’s favorite album by heart.

He did not look like that man right now.

“Mr. Gomez-” Owen started, already moving out from behind the counter.

Mr. Gomez didn’t stop. He didn’t even seem to register Owen was there. He crossed the floor in a few hard strides and disappeared into the back office, and the door slammed a second time, hard enough to rattle the framed gold record on the wall beside it.

Owen stood there for a second, the forgotten bag of bread still in his hand.

He’d seen Mr. Gomez annoyed. Grumpy about a bad distributor, irritated at a customer who wanted to haggle over a beat-up Zeppelin pressing. He had never seen this. Something with teeth in it, something that didn’t sound like it belonged to the man he knew.

“Mr. Gomez? You good in there?”

Nothing. Then, muffled through the door, a sound that took Owen a second to place, because he’d never once heard it from his boss before: something between a laugh and a sob, ragged at the edges.

“It’s gone,” Mr. Gomez said, to no one, to the room, to himself. “Thirty-one years, and it’s just gone.”

Owen’s hand hovered near the doorknob, and for a moment he didn’t move it. This wasn’t his to walk in on. Mr. Gomez was his boss, a man Owen respected, admired even, but not someone whose grief he had any right to intrude on just because he was curious, or concerned, or both.

“Mr. Gomez, it’s Owen. Can I come in?”

“Not now, Owen.” The voice was wrong. Flat in a way that scared him more than shouting would have. “Not now.”

He should have listened. He’d think about that later, turn it over in his head more times than he could count. The version of that afternoon where he backed off, gave the man his space, called it a night and went home to his complaining radiator.

Instead, heart hammering, hand not quite steady, he opened the door.

Mr. Gomez was sitting behind his desk, and for one disorienting second nothing looked wrong at all. same cluttered desk, same framed photo of his late wife, same chipped coffee mug shaped like a treble clef. Mr. Gomez himself was gripping the edge of the desk so hard his knuckles had gone bloodless, staring at a bank statement like it might rearrange itself into better news if he just glared long enough.

Owen stayed by the doorway. Every instinct in him wanted to go to him, but something about the stillness in the room, the wrongness of it, kept his feet rooted where they were. “Mr. Gomez, w-what’s going on?” His voice cracked on the question, thinner than he wanted it to be.

Mr. Gomez looked up, and Owen had to fight the urge to step back. For a moment there was something in his eyes that didn’t look like the man who’d taught Owen how to properly clean a record, who’d covered his shift without complaint the week his mom was in the hospital, who’d once handed him an entire year-end bonus in loose twenties because “the bank makes me nervous, just take it kid.” Owen didn’t know this version of him. That was the frightening part, not the shouting, not the slammed doors, but not recognizing him at all.

“Everything,” Mr. Gomez said. “I lost everything.”

And then the room folded.

The last thing he saw before the world came apart at the seams was Mr. Gomez’s face, twisted somewhere between grief and a rage so old and so deep it didn’t look like it belonged to a person anymore.

Owen didn’t remember deciding to move. There was the office, and then there wasn’t, and then there was nothing at all. No floor, no walls, no weight to his own body. Then, all at once, there was somewhere else.