Still Here (Soft Places #1)

Chapter One

Hello, my love. The world keeps shifting under our feet. So, I made a small place where nothing has to move unless it wants to. If I do this right, it will outlast the fear.

Still here, Clyde

Ellis had been overwhelmed every day of his life. Nothing was ever quiet. He had tried to fit into so many spaces that weren't moldable for him. Nowhere seemed to feel right. Or easy.

That is, except the record store. It seemed to always stay the same.

It was a constant. Ellis almost felt like how other people said they feel when he was there.

They waxed poetry about belonging, about embracing the welcome in spaces.

They liked the ambiance or they liked the bustling activity. Ellis never liked any of that.

Here, there were old cardboard sleeves. Dust warmed by sunlight.

Plastic softened with age. A faint metallic tang from the register Clyde never replaced because, according to him, it still worked just fine if you didn’t rush it.

Nothing had really moved in the last decade. Time moved slower for the record store.

Ellis liked that nothing here ever tried to surprise him. There was never a ‘why can’t you be more normal’, never a ‘that sound isn’t that loud, get over it.’ Clyde never changed anything. The record store was its own mausoleum.

The bell above the door chimed at exactly the same pitch every time it opened.

It sounded slightly flat, a tired little chime that was honest and familiar.

The hum of the refrigerator that held sodas and milk crates full of seven-inches stayed consistent, a low vibration Ellis could feel through the soles of his boots when he stood behind the counter.

Even the floorboards had their own map of creaks, a geography Ellis had memorized by the time he was fifteen.

Predictable. Regulated. Safe.

Ellis lined up the new arrivals bin with the edge of the counter, tapping it twice to make sure it was square.

Clyde pretended not to notice things like that, which Ellis appreciated.

He had learned early on that pointing it out made Ellis feel like a specimen instead of a person.

So Clyde let him fix things quietly, like it was just part of how the store breathed, and Ellis breathed with it.

Ellis liked the monotony of it all. He liked meticulous work better than any other kind.

Outside, the world was loud in ways that didn’t make sense. There were sirens without warning, conversations that overlapped, weather that shifted its weight suddenly. People changed plans. People lied. People died.

Inside the store, the rules were clear. Vinyl went alphabetically by the artist’s last name.

Punk stayed separate from classic rock, even if some bands insisted on blurring the line.

Jazz had its own corner, away from the door, because Clyde said it deserved patience.

The turntable needle needed replacing every six months, no matter how much Clyde insisted he could stretch it longer.

Every deviation was logged. Every change announced. It was the only place Ellis knew where change didn’t ambush him. Where feelings didn’t ambush him.

When Ellis's father died, everything else stopped following rules. He had been a firefighter. That was always the first thing people said, like it explained everything else. Like it made his death make sense.

“He was a hero,” they’d say, “He knew the risks. At least he died doing something meaningful.”

Ellis was twelve, and all he understood was that the man who tied his shoes too tight and burned grilled cheese every single time wasn’t coming home.

The station chaplain came to their apartment and sat on the couch, crushing the cushions flat beneath his weight.

Ellis's mother kept nodding like she was agreeing to something invisible. Ellis watched his mouth move and tried to count how many times he said his father’s name.

He lost track after nine.

After that, the world felt like it had been knocked slightly off its axis. Not enough that anyone else noticed. Enough that nothing lined up the way it was supposed to.

Ellis's mother drank before, but it had been contained. A glass of wine at night. A beer while cooking dinner. After his dad died, it spread. It soaked into the mornings, the afternoons, the weekends. Bottles started appearing in places they didn’t belong.

Ellis found them under the sink, behind the couch, in the bathroom cabinet.

The cabinet where her old pink towels were supposed to go.

The house developed its own unpredictable soundtrack, one Ellis couldn’t escape or turn off.

Cabinets slammed without warning. The television blared at volumes that made Ellis's chest feel too tight.

Her voice shifted without pattern. Sometimes syrupy and slow and then sometimes sharp enough to slice through walls.

Ellis learned to listen for the sound of her keys hitting the counter.

He deciphered what it meant when she laughed too loudly at nothing.

He grew especially good at deciding when it was time to leave.

He learned when to leave as fast as possible.

That was how Ellis found the record store.

At first, he only came in on days when being home felt physically unbearable. When the air felt wrong, when his skin buzzed like he’d touched something live and couldn’t get it to settle, the sensation driving away his ability to think of anything else.

Ellis was forever grateful that Clyde never asked why a twelve-year-old was wandering into a punk record shop at three in the afternoon on a school day. Ellis would not have been able to work up the ambition to utter a sound.

Clyde just nodded once, like he understood more than he let on, and turned the music down a notch. He always watched Ellis with a glint in his eye, one whose meaning Ellis couldn't place.

Ellis would lower himself, shaking, onto the floor between the shelves and flip through records slowly, carefully, like each one was a promise that the world could still be organized if someone tried hard enough.

Each record held something of importance to him, a pattern that only he could make out.

The store didn’t smell like alcohol. It didn’t echo with shouting.

Nothing in it lurched unpredictably from joy to rage.

Clyde let him stay as long as he wanted.

Sometimes they didn’t talk at all. Other times Clyde told stories that wandered the way old men’s stories do.

He spoke about bands that never made it big, about protests he went to in the seventies, about lovers whose names he never said out loud.

Clyde loved to tell a story. He made it into an entire show, one that filled up all of the record store with its grandeur.

Clyde was openly queer in a way that felt solid, unashamed.

Ellis didn’t have the language for himself back then, but something in him recognized that steadiness.

That permission to exist as you were. The unabashedness of an older man that had had a long time to accept himself as he was.

And not feel like he was lacking or less than for it. Unlike Ellis.

Eventually, the store started feeling less like a hiding place and more like a home. When Clyde offered Ellis a job when he finally hit fourteen, he didn’t make a big deal out of it.

He just slid a milk crate across the counter and said, “You already know how everything works. Might as well get paid for it.”

Of course he would be paid under the table. Even in Seattle the minimum working age was fifteen, but Ellis nodded once. That was all he could manage, his chest too full for words. And he'd been there ever since.

The rhythm of the place shaped Ellis in ways school never did.

He learned how to talk to customers by watching Clyde.

He emulated Clyde and learned to properly behave for others.

How to be honest without being cruel, how to recommend music without pretending to know everything.

Ellis had this problem. He simply knew more about records and their maintenance than other people.

People were stupid, he quickly realized.

They lied about how much they knew about topics and Ellis learned that he hated liars.

Especially when he knew the truth. There were more than a handful of arguments that left with customers angrily not buying the records they were holding.

Which was good in Ellis's opinion. They didn’t want to learn how to properly store them anyways.

And Ellis knew everything about properly storing records.

He learned how to occupy space without apologizing for it. He learned that there were adults who didn’t yell when things went wrong.

Clyde became Ellis's best friend by accident. He knew Ellis didn’t like being touched without warning, so he never clapped him on the shoulder like men his age often did.

He knew Ellis needed schedules, so he wrote shifts months in advance even though Ellis never asked.

When Ellis shut down, Clyde filled the silence without demanding a response.

Or better, he simply let the silence be.

On bad days, he put on the same Ramones record and said, “You need something fast today,” like it was a prescription only he could write.

Standing behind the counter now, older but still tethered to the same routines, Ellis ran his fingers along the edge of the wood where years of elbows had worn the finish smooth.

His father used to say routines were boring, that life was about action.

Ellis wondered what he would have thought of this place.

He thought of how it saved him in ways no one else noticed.