The Antique Shop That Was Gone the Next Day

I was killing time before an appointment, wandering a street of old buildings downtown, when I found an antique shop I had never noticed. Narrow, deep, packed floor to ceiling with the good kind of clutter: clocks, lamps, boxes of postcards, furniture stacked on furniture. A little bell rang over the door when I went in.

The owner was an elderly man with a waistcoat and a soft voice who let me browse and then, when I lingered, told me the history of half the objects in the place. He was wonderful company. We talked for the better part of an hour. There was a small mantel clock I fell in love with, brass and walnut, but I did not have the cash on me, and he said, kindly, that it would keep, and to come back tomorrow.

I came back the next day with the money. I found the street. I found the buildings on either side, which I remembered clearly. Between them, where the shop had been, there was no shop. There was an old bricked-up doorway, the brick grey and weathered and obviously decades old, no bell, no window, no sign, nothing that had been open to the public in a very long time.

I asked in the cafe next door. The young woman there had worked the street for six years and told me there had never been an antique shop there in her time, that the space had been sealed up long before she started. I described the owner, the waistcoat, the soft voice. She went a little pale and said that sounded like the man who had run an antique shop on that block, but that he had passed away many years ago.

I never got the clock. I still look for the shop every time I am downtown. The doorway is always bricked, always grey, always old.