Joseph Fink - Welcome to Night Vale

Of course, angels do not exist. It is illegal to consider their existence, or even to give them a dollar when they forget bus money and start hovering around the Ralphs asking for change. The great hierarchy of angels is a foolish dream, and anyway is forbidden knowledge to Night Vale citizens. All of the angels in Night Vale live with Josie out by the car lot. There are no angels in Night Vale.

Around the middle of the day, Jackie had acquired a car. It was a Mercedes, only a few years old, and offered with urgency by a young man wearing a gray pin-striped business suit stained with dirt. It was impressive how he got the car onto the counter, but there is a way these things are done, and it had to go on the counter. He washed his hands and chanted. The water went brown and red.

She settled on an offer of five dollars, talking him down from eleven, and he laughed as he took the money and the ticket.

“It’s not funny at all,” he explained, laughing.

And finally a woman named Diane Crayton arrived late in the afternoon—almost closing time according to Jackie’s gut.

“Can I help you?” Jackie asked. She was unsure why she asked this, as Jackie rarely greeted people who came in the store.

Jackie knew who Diane was. She organized PTA fund-raisers. Diane sometimes came by to distribute flyers that said things like “Night Vale High School PTA Fund Drive! Help give kids the municipally approved education they deserve. Your support is mandatory and appreciated!”

Diane, in Jackie’s mind, looked just like a woman who would be an active PTA mom, with her kind face and comfortable clothing. She also thought Diane looked like a woman who would be a loan officer, with her conservative makeup choices and serious demeanor. She would look like a pharmacist if she ever were to wear the standard white coat, gas mask, and hip waders.

She looked like a lot of things to Jackie. Mostly she looked like a person lost in both a place and a moment.

Diane took a handkerchief from her purse. Without changing her upward, distant expression, she wept a single tear onto the cloth.

“I’d like to offer this,” she said, finally looking at Jackie.

Jackie considered the handkerchief. The tear would dry soon.

“Eleven dollars. That’s the deal,” she said.

“I’ll take it,” Diane said. Her loose-hanging arms were now drawn up near her purse.

Jackie took the tear-dabbed handkerchief and gave Diane her ticket and the money.

After her brief death, Diane thanked her, and hurried out of the shop. Jackie tagged the tear with its eleven-dollar price tag and placed it on a shelf.

So a decent day. Jackie flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, her hand touching the window, leaving its ghost upon the glass, a hand raised to say “Stop” or “Come here” or “Hello” or “Help” or maybe only “I am here. This hand, at least, is real.”

She looked down to adjust the items on the counter, and when she looked up, the man was there.

He was wearing a tan jacket, and holding a deerskin suitcase. He had normal human features. He had arms and legs. He might have had hair, or maybe was wearing a hat. Everything was normal.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Everett.”

Jackie screamed. The man was perfectly normal. She screamed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you closed?”

“No, that’s okay, no. Can I help you?”

“Yes, I hope so,” he said. There was buzzing coming from somewhere. His mouth?

“I have an item I would very much like to pawn.”

“I…” she said, and waved her hand to indicate everything she might have said next. He nodded at her hand.

“Thank you for your help. Have I introduced myself?”

“No.”

“Ah, I apologize. My name is Emmett.”

They shook hands. Her hand continued to shake after he let go.

“Yes, well,” he said. “Here is the item.”

He set a small slip of paper on the counter. On it, written in dull, smeared pencil, were the words “KING CITY.” The handwriting was shaky and the pencil had been pressed down hard. She couldn’t stop staring at it, although she didn’t know what about it was interesting.

“Interesting,” she said.

“No, not very,” said the man in the tan jacket.

The man washed his hands and quietly chanted, and Jackie forced herself to lean back and put her feet on the counter. There is a way these things are done. She looked a few times at the man’s face, but she found she forgot it the moment she stopped looking.

“Eleven dollars,” she said. The man hummed, and other small voices joined him, apparently from within the deerskin suitcase.

“Where did this come from?” she asked. “Why are you offering it to me? What would I do with it?”

Her voice was high and cracked. It did not sound like her at all.

The man was now harmonizing with the voices from his suitcase. He did not seem to register her questions.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” she said, fully aware of, but unable to stop, her poor negotiating technique. “My mistake. Thirty dollars and an idea about time.”

“Done,” he said, smiling. Was that a smile?

She gave him the thirty dollars and told him her idea about time.

“That is very interesting,” he said. “I’ve never thought of it that way. Generally, I don’t think at all.”

Then he died. She usually used this time to finish up the paperwork, get the ticket ready. She did nothing. She clutched the slip of paper in her hand. He wasn’t dead anymore.

“I’m sorry. Your ticket.”

“There’s no need,” he said, still possibly smiling. She couldn’t get a good enough look at his face to tell.

“No, your ticket. There is a way these things are done.” She scrawled out a ticket, with the information tickets always had. A random number (12,739), the quality of light at time of transaction (“fine”), the general feeling of the weather outside (“looming”), her current thoughts on the future (“looming, but fine”), and a quick sketch of what she thought hearts should look like, instead of the pulsing lumps of straw and clay that grow, cancer-like, into our chests when we turn nine years old.

He took the ticket as she thrust it at him, and then, thanking her, turned to leave.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“KING CITY,” said the paper.

“Good-bye,” waved the man, saying nothing.

“Wait,” she said, “you never told me your name.”

“Oh, you’re right,” he said, hand on door. “My name is Elliott. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

The door swung open and shut. Jackie held the slip of paper in her hand, unsure for the first time in however long her life had been what to do next. She felt that her routine, unbroken for decades, had been disrupted, that something had gone differently. But she also had no idea why she felt that. It was just a slip of paper, just clutched in her hand, just that.

She finished her paperwork; on the line that said “pawned by,” she stopped. She could not remember his name. She couldn’t even remember his face. She looked down at the piece of paper. “KING CITY.” She looked up to get a glimpse of him out the window, just to jostle her stuck memory.

From the counter, she could see the man in the tan jacket outside. He was running out to the desert. She could just barely see him at at the edge of the parking lot’s radius of light. His arms were swinging wildly, his suitcase swinging along. His legs were flailing, great puffs of sand kicked up behind him, his head thrown back, sweat visible running down his neck even from where she sat. The kind of run that was from something and not toward. Then he left the faint edge of the light and was gone.

There’s this house. It’s not unlike many other houses. Imagine what a house looks like.