Welcome to Night Vale

THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

CECIL:… I couldn’t taste anything at all for weeks afterwards. No one does a dinner party like Earl Harlan.

Folks, I’m pretty excited about this next bit of news. The staff of local advocacy group Citizens for a Blood Space War have put together Night Vale’s first ever flea market. This Friday at the Rec Center, craftspeople, artisans, antique trainers and breeders, and cold patches of air indicating the likely presence of a ghost will bring their wares to town.

The Last Bank of Night Vale will be the title sponsor of the flea market. There will be plenty of free parking and helicopters monitoring all shoppers from above. The Last Bank Flea Market will also bring in food from some of Night Vale’s most popular eateries, like Big Rico’s Pizza, Pieces o’ Glass, Shame, Tourniquet, and Pinkberry. Admission is five dollars and supports our local charity Citizens for a Blood Space War.

The Last Bank of Night Vale will also be offering no-fee checking accounts to those looking to follow local laws, which were recently changed to require every single person to have a checking account at the Last Bank of Night Vale. You can bank wherever you like, as long as you bank at the Last Bank of Night Vale.

The City Council would like to remind all citizens to please use proper methods for organizing regular trash and recycling. For instance, recycling must be divided into paper, plastic, feathers, teeth, and glass, each in a color-coded bag. Also, regular trash pickup is every Tuesday and Friday morning, whereas recycling is taken from your home at unannounced intervals. You will know recycling has been picked up because your recycling bags will be gone and there will be a large, reddish brown smear across your front door roughly in the shape of an X. Or maybe it’s a cross. It’s not clear in the brochure I’ve been handed, which has no words, only dark black-and-white photographs of angled shadows along brick walls. I mean, municipal one-sheets are kind of useless, but this one is at least haunting.

And now let’s have a look at traffic.

There is a man with a gray pin-striped suit and without a job. He is sitting on the hood of his nice car, looking at other cars as they go places. He is not going anywhere. He knows that now.

All this time he had lived for the future. The future had been the firm ground he stood on, and the present was only the slight haze in the air. But now he understood that the future was a joke without a punch line and that whatever he had in the present was what he would have always. He did not have much in the present. He had a very nice car.

He called someone. It doesn’t matter who. It was his lover. They called each other that. It was the name they preferred. It didn’t matter to them what anyone else thought of the word.

“Where are you?” his lover said. “They said you didn’t come in.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt? When are you coming home?”

Was he hurt? He stopped to consider this. He didn’t think so. He examined his body. He took off his suit and his silver watch, laid them in the dirt, and stood there with his phone, naked, looking at himself. No, he wasn’t hurt, he thought. Not physically.

He opened his mouth to answer, but looking up he saw something in the sky. It was a planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It was so far away that he couldn’t be sure he was even seeing it, and yet it felt more real and present to him than the cars driving on the highway below him.

He hung up without answering, which was, in its own way, an answer. He looked up. He couldn’t see the planet anymore. He put his suit back on. He picked up his watch. It was covered in dirt. He got back in his car and drove.

This has been traffic.

And now a word from our sponsors. Or not now, but later. Much later. You won’t know it when it happens. It’ll be just one of many words you’ll encounter that day. But it will come leaden with unseen meaning and consequence, and it will slowly spread throughout your life, invisibly infecting every light moment with its heaviness. Our sponsors cannot be escaped. You will see their word. And you will never know.