God lives above the record shop

In the Ninth North Alley, there’s a record shop. God lives in the flat above. The sign says VINYL & VOID in tarnished gold. The bell rings once. You have not touched the door. The clerk has stood there since nineteen seventy-two. Nobody remembers hiring him. He never asks what you came to find. He puts a record beside your hand and waits. Upstairs: one footstep. Downstairs: needle drop. Nobody looks at the ceiling. Nobody asks about God. You only find the door when the fog is right, when the streetlamps lose their edges in the night. Keep your voice down, let the needle drop— God lives above the record shop. Thump—silence—thump. Don’t look up. The incense smells of jasmine when He likes the cut. Ask for the album that was never pressed, the B-side of a heartbeat, a symphony suppressed. The clerk does not blink. He reaches below. Black wax. Blank sleeve. No catalogue number. Your name is on the label in somebody else’s hand. He says, “Side two.” Above us, a chair moves slowly across the floor. Upstairs: one footstep. Downstairs: needle drop. Nobody looks at the ceiling. Nobody asks about God. You only find the door when the fog is right, when the streetlamps lose their edges in the night. Keep your voice down, let the needle drop— God lives above the record shop. Side one sounds like a summer you misplaced. Side two contains a voice you almost know. The third track has not happened yet. You know every word. At the chorus, the floorboards find the beat. Dust drifts down through the yellow light. The clerk smells the air. “Jasmine,” he says. “Good.” We all walk that alley on a Tuesday in June, past the bakery and bins under ordinary sun. We say we’re going somewhere practical. We listen for a bell behind the brick. Maybe we invented the fog. Maybe the fog invented us. Maybe wanting somewhere badly enough is how a door begins. Then the floorboards groan. Every needle jumps. Every window hums. One heavy foot comes down— And the whole damned city keeps time. You only find the door when the fog is right, when the streetlamps lose their edges in the night. Keep your voice down, let the needle drop— God lives above the record shop. You only find the door when the fog is right, when every wrong street starts looking right. Hold to the record when the whole room stops— God lives above the record shop. Thump—silence—thump. Nobody looks up. The whole room smells of jasmine. God likes the cut. By morning, Ninth North Alley is a brick wall and a dumpster behind the bakery. No sign. No door. No flat above. Just a sunny Tuesday in June. I might have called it a dream if the record in my hands had not still been warm.