Wendy
Warm dust and old paper. The smell is a fixture in my lungs. My mother used to say the Vinyl Vault smelled like preserved time, but she was a romantic. I’m a realist. It smells like dying cardboard, static electricity, and fifty years of other people's memories stacked floor to ceiling in a town that’s rotting from the inside out. Crimson Hollow is a graveyard with a zip code. The only reason I’m still standing behind this oak counter is because leaving means handing over the last piece of my mother to the wolves.
The wolves wear suits these days. They carry clipboards. The Silver Serpent Syndicate doesn’t bother hiding in the shadows anymore. They have a schedule. They have administrative assistants. They’re corporatizing their extortion, turning thugs into middle management. Every Tuesday at three in the afternoon, a man walks into my shop to collect his protection money. Today is Thursday. I should be safe. I should be cataloging this new estate sale haul in peace, sliding worn cardboard sleeves out of plastic protectors and checking the vinyl for scratches.