Retro Reels

It began, as a surprising number of Snowdrift Bay disasters did, with a perfectly wholesome idea.

Movie night.

Not just any movie night, either. A real one. A committed one. A proper communal marathon with snacks, blankets, arguments about genre, and the kind of overplanned enthusiasm that made the whole thing feel less like a casual evening and more like a cultural undertaking.

By the time Yorn arrived at the Salty Kraken that evening, the plan had already acquired momentum.

The tavern was warm and loud in the way it always was at dusk, full of clinking glasses, low conversation, and the smell of fried food, old wood, and Barnaby Blackbeard’s questionable understanding of ventilation. At a corner table near the back, Elara, Brenda, Philip, and Ramses were already gathered around a spread of scribbled notes, half-finished drinks, and the sort of serious expressions usually reserved for military logistics or seating charts at emotionally unstable weddings.

Yorn sat down. “All right. Where are we.”

“In conflict,” said Philip immediately.

“Good,” said Yorn. “That means we’re making progress.”

Brenda slid a handwritten list across the table. “We’re trying to build a lineup everyone can live with.”

“Elara wants romance,” said Philip.

“I want one romance,” Elara corrected smoothly. “Not an evening of explosions, paranoia, and men yelling in tunnels.”

Ramses, who was nursing a drink with his usual grave elegance, folded his bandaged arms. “Explosions are honest. They ask very little of the audience.”

“Explosions ask nothing of the audience,” Brenda said. “That’s the problem.”

Philip pointed one bony finger at the list. “And I maintain that if we’re doing a marathon, we need horror. A real one. Something psychologically corrosive.”

Yorn nodded slowly. “That feels on brand for you.”

“It is on brand for me,” Philip said.

Barnaby, who had wandered past just long enough to become involved without invitation, leaned over the table and squinted at the page.

“Where’s the adventure picture?” he demanded. “Ye can’t do a marathon without at least one proper treasure map, one betrayal, and a rope bridge no one should trust.”

Brenda pointed at him. “That’s actually reasonable.”

“Of course it is,” Barnaby said. “I’m a publican, not an idiot.”

So they argued.

Not bitterly.
Just thoroughly.

Ramses wanted action, specifically the kind with “minimal emotional delay between explosion and consequence.”
Elara wanted a romantic comedy “with actual chemistry and at least one scene where someone realizes too late they’ve been in love the whole time.”
Philip wanted horror, but not stupid horror. He kept rejecting things for being “too wet,” “too derivative,” or “insufficiently haunted.”
Brenda wanted balance, which meant she suffered the most.

Eventually they reached a compromise.

An action thriller.
A sappy romantic comedy.
A psychological horror film.
And a cult adventure movie that Barnaby insisted was “historically important,” though no one could determine whether he meant historically important to cinema or just to him personally.

“Good,” said Yorn, looking over the final list. “This is a strong lineup.”

“It is a fragile peace,” Brenda said.

“Those are the best kinds,” said Elara.

Then came snacks.

This required an entirely different kind of negotiation.

Popcorn was mandatory.
Candy was non-negotiable.
Chips were inevitable.
Soda was expected.
Ramses contributed what he called “an ancient spice blend” in a tone that suggested no follow-up questions would improve anyone’s life.

By the time they finished, the whole thing felt real enough to be exciting.

Which was how they ended up heading for Retro Reels.

Retro Reels was one of those places in Snowdrift Bay that seemed to exist slightly to one side of time.

Wedged between a taxidermy shop that was always open yet never visibly occupied and a knitting café whose tea was somehow always room temperature no matter when one ordered it, Retro Reels had the look of a business that had long ago decided progress was vulgar and committed to the bit with almost spiritual force.

Its neon sign buzzed weakly overhead.

RETRO REELS

One tube flickered inconsistently, so that from certain angles the sign appeared to say RET O RE LS, which somehow made it feel more authentic. In the front window hung a faded poster reading WE HAVE THE MOVIES, secured with what looked suspiciously like electrical tape and optimism.

Yorn stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at it.

“I like it already,” he said.

“Of course you do,” said Brenda. “It looks like tetanus rents films.”

They went in.

A bell jingled somewhere above the door.

Inside, the place smelled like dust, cardboard sleeves, stale carpet, and old electronics. Shelves stretched wall to wall, lined with VHS tapes in sun-faded boxes whose cover art ranged from iconic to legally questionable. Handwritten labels marked categories with dubious consistency.

ACTION
DRAMA
LOVE / SAD LOVE
HORROR
OTHER

The fluorescent lighting hummed softly overhead.

No music played.
No modernity intruded.
It was perfect.

Yorn moved down one aisle with the reverence of a man entering a shrine.

“This place is incredible.”

“It’s a fire code violation with nostalgia,” said Brenda.

Philip had already drifted toward horror, drawn by instinct. He pulled out a tape with a black-and-red cover showing a screaming house and a man with no obvious plan.

“This one claims audiences had to be escorted out of theaters.”

Elara stepped over and peered at the back. “That one was removed from circulation because it included actual evidence from an unresolved crime.”

Philip considered this.

Then nodded slowly. “So… effective marketing.”

“No,” said Elara.

Meanwhile Ramses found an action movie whose cover promised 97 EXPLOSIONS! ONE MAN! ZERO REGRETS!

He held it up with quiet approval. “This seems efficient.”

Brenda, in the romance section, was collecting options with the brisk certainty of a woman who already knew which one would make Yorn emotional and intended to weaponize that knowledge later.

“This one,” she said, holding up a tape where two suspiciously attractive people looked miserable in expensive coats, “is definitely making him cry.”

Yorn turned from a shelf of adventure movies. “I am not going to cry.”

“You’re absolutely going to cry.”

“Only if the writing is manipulative.”

Elara smiled faintly. “So yes.”

They browsed longer than necessary because that was part of the pleasure of it. They held up boxes. Rejected things on principle. Read taglines aloud in bad voices. Philip got into a brief but sincere dispute with Ramses over whether a movie with five explosions in the trailer could really call itself psychological.

At last they approached the counter with their selections piled in their arms like treasure.

Behind the register stood a man in a name tag that simply said STEVE.

He had the exhausted, half-translucent demeanor of someone who had either worked retail too long or perhaps never been fully solid to begin with. He did not greet them so much as acknowledge the burden of their arrival.

“Find everything?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Brenda.

“Probably,” said Philip.

Steve rang up the tapes with the slow, resigned efficiency of a man who knew time was fake but inventory was forever.

Yorn paid.

They took the bag.
Left the store.
Stepped back out into the cold night air feeling absurdly satisfied with themselves.

The walk to Brenda and Philip’s apartment was cheerful.

They discussed order.
Snack timing.
Whether the horror movie should go second or third.
Whether Ramses’ spice blend required warning labels.

Yorn was halfway up the front steps when the thought hit him.

He stopped dead.

So did everyone else, one by one, because the stop was that kind of stop.

Elara turned first. “What is it.”

Yorn looked down at the bag in his hands.

Then slowly reached in and pulled out one of the tapes.

The whole group stared at it.

Then at him.

Then back at it.

Yorn said, very carefully, “Does anyone here actually own a VCR?”

Silence.

Real silence.
Heavy silence.
The kind that arrives not because no one has anything to say, but because what needs to be said is so humiliating that everyone hopes someone else will go first.

Philip lowered his tape by an inch.

Brenda blinked.

Ramses stared at the bag with the slow, dawning offense of a man realizing he had participated enthusiastically in a flawed operation.

Elara looked thoughtful for one second too long.

Then she said, “No.”

Brenda groaned. “No.”

Ramses lifted one hand. “I haven’t seen a VCR in years.”

Philip stood perfectly still, tape in hand, as if physical stillness might delay the reality of what had just happened.

Yorn shut his eyes. “We just spent an hour choosing movies we physically cannot watch.”

Brenda put one hand over her mouth. “This is so embarrassing.”

Philip’s jaw clicked faintly. “This is worse than embarrassing.”

Yorn looked at him. “Is it.”

Philip turned slowly. “Yes.”

They all stood there on the landing, carrying their impossible little pile of obsolete entertainment, while the full stupidity of the situation settled over them like weather.

At last Yorn sighed.

“All right,” he said. “Fine. We return the tapes, go home, and stream something.”

No one objected.

They turned around at once.

Back through the cold.
Back through the dim street.
Back toward Retro Reels.

But when they reached the corner, the block felt wrong.

Not dramatically wrong.

Just… off.

Too still.

The neon sign wasn’t buzzing anymore.
The window no longer glowed.
The whole storefront sat in a kind of dead silence that made the knitting café next door feel suddenly more ominous by association.

Yorn slowed. “That’s strange.”

Brenda looked at the darkened façade. “Was it this quiet before?”

“No,” said Elara.

Philip stepped forward first.

He reached for the door handle.

His hand hit the front of the building with a hollow thump.

Not glass.
Not wood.

Something thinner.

The entire storefront wobbled.

Everyone froze.

Then, with a pathetic little collapsing sound, the front of Retro Reels tipped forward and fell flat into the street.

It landed in a spray of dust and brittle splinters.

The whole thing—door, window, sign, counterfront illusion and all—had been nothing more than a painted plywood façade propped upright with two braces and what now looked like almost insulting confidence.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Behind the fallen front was… nothing.

No store.
No shelves.
No fluorescent lighting.
No Steve.

Just a narrow, empty lot with weeds near the back wall and one crushed soda can glinting under the moonlight.

Brenda looked down at the tapes in her arms.

Then at the empty space.

Then back at the tapes.

“No.”

Philip took one very careful step backward.

“But,” he said, with rising skeletal panic, “we were inside.”

No one answered.

Philip looked at Yorn.

“There were aisles.”

Yorn nodded slowly. “There were.”

“There were shelves.”

“Yes.”

“There was a man named Steve.”

“I know.”

Philip’s voice climbed another notch.

“He rang up the movies.”

“Yes.”

“We paid him.”

“Yes.”

Philip whipped around to face the others, eye sockets wide with dawning existential damage.

“Then where did any of that happen.”

That was the question.

Not where the store had gone.
Not why it was closed.
Not whether someone had played a trick.

No.

Where had they physically been standing?

Because they had all been inside it.
They had touched the tapes.
They had walked the aisles.
They had browsed.
They had spoken to Steve.

And yet now there was a plywood façade lying in the street like bad scenery after a very committed hallucination.

A gust of cold wind passed through the empty lot.

It did not improve anything.

Brenda clutched the bag tighter. “I don’t like this at all.”

Elara, who was usually the calmest person in any room, looked at the fallen storefront with the expression of someone carefully choosing not to speculate aloud.

Ramses said, “I would like to go.”

Philip turned to Yorn again.

“Yorn,” he said, voice dry with real panic now. “Was any of it real.”

Yorn, who had no answer and knew better than to pretend he did, hesitated.

“…Apparently enough of it was.”

Philip grabbed Brenda lightly by both shoulders and gave her one shake.

“WHERE DID THE TAPES COME FROM, BRENDA?”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

That was enough.

No one needed more investigating.
No one needed closure.
No one needed to spend one additional second on that sidewalk.

They went back to Brenda and Philip’s apartment immediately.

The tapes were dumped onto the coffee table with the caution usually reserved for cursed heirlooms and unexploded devices.

No one sat too close to them.

The room was quiet.

Then Yorn, staring at the stack, asked the obvious.

“…What do we do with these.”

Philip, who had been sitting very stiffly on the couch and staring into the middle distance for the last ten minutes, answered without looking away.

“Burn them.”

Brenda clicked on the television with visible exhaustion. “We’re streaming something.”

Elara nodded once. “Agreed.”

Ramses, still watching the tapes with narrowed suspicion, said, “I don’t want them facing me.”

So Brenda turned them around.

This helped almost not at all.

They put on a movie eventually. Something easy. Something familiar. Something available on a real, verifiable platform that could be paused, resumed, and located on a map of reality.

But no one fully relaxed.

Not really.

Now and then Philip would glance at the tapes and visibly resent them for continuing to exist.

At one point he muttered, to no one in particular, “They shouldn’t be here.”

Yorn, trying to restore some atmosphere, patted him once on the shoulder.

“Shh,” he said. “It’s fine.”

Philip turned slowly toward him.

“It is not fine.”

And he was right.

It was not fine.

The tapes remained on the table all night, mute and rectangular and impossible.

No one touched them again.

And from that night on, no one in Snowdrift Bay ever mentioned Retro Reels unless they were extremely drunk, very tired, or trying to frighten someone who had made the mistake of saying that old video stores had charm.

Because in Snowdrift Bay, charm was often just the first stage of a much more specific problem.