Welcome to Night Vale

THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

CECIL: And now, the community calendar.

Saturday is a softball game between Night Vale Community Radio and Night Vale Local News TV. I don’t mind telling you, this is not a game I enjoy. The creatures that work in television news, because of the shape and quantity of their appendages, often hold the bat in ways that are unsettling to the human eye. They usually win by creeping out the other team so much that the opposing team all goes to sit mutely on the bench while the TV News team plays their way to a win on an empty field. Come out for what should be a great game!

Sunday is the annual Imaginary Corn Festival and Fun Fair, celebrating our town’s most important crop. Come try out some simple and healthy imaginary corn recipes and take part in a costume contest sponsored by the Night Vale Daily Journal. They are asking that everyone dress up as the decline of the printed word in a society reverting to a state of brainless animality. The best costume wins one year of not being forced to purchase several Daily Journal subscriptions by newspaper employees armed with hatchets. There will also be rides and carnival games and apprehensive excitement and hoped-for futures and stomach pains and sweat and disappointment and sweat and sweat and love and glances that mean more than they should but less than they need to and a dunking booth.

Monday will be free-sample day at the Sheraton Funeral Home.

Tuesday will be reversed. We will rise tired from sleep to find that it is night and brush plaque onto our teeth. We will move backwards to work, where we will undo spreadsheets, lose ideas to dissipating meetings, and unsee hundreds of cat pictures. Then, returning with a buzz of caffeine to our homes, we will spit liquid alertness into cups and, refreshed but groggy, return to dreams that we faintly, just faintly, remember.

Wednesday is Smell Like a Pirate Day. Everyone in town is encouraged to get in on the wacky fun by not bathing for weeks and rubbing yourself with ash and blood.

Thursday, the employees at Dark Owl Records will be holding a séance to reach the ghost of Patsy Cline. If you’d like to come by and help, just enter quietly and please wear a bolo tie. We’re all wearing bolo ties now. And don’t wear those shoes. God, do we have to tell you everything? Maybe it’s better if you don’t come by. Records are not for sale, as usual.

We are skipping Friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having Double Friday next week. Mark your schedules.

This has been the community calendar.

I’ve just been handed an update. The Secret Police would like to retract their earlier statement that they will be out in large numbers tonight. That was not meant to be known.

“You think you want to know things, but then you know them, and it’s too late. You didn’t want to know that. You didn’t want to know that at all,” the Secret Police’s press release reads. “This is one of those things you will wish you had never known.”

The statement goes on to say that memory is a tenuous human construct, and nothing matters in the Grand Scheme, so whatever.

In other news, a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase, was seen. I don’t remember anything about him or why this was news, but it had seemed important at the time. I wrote it down: “Say the important thing about the man in the tan jacket.” What was it? What was I supposed to say?