Welcome to Night Vale

THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

CECIL:… break into his storage locker? Who would do such a thing? Feral dogs probably. They are notorious thieves.

In other news, a recent report suggests that things may not be as they seem. The report explains that things are definitely what they are, but never what they seem. Many scientists contributed to the report. They studied numbers that were on computer screens and wrote out long equations and drew many diagrams that helped prove their point.

“Even these pages you think you’re reading could be quite different from what you think you see,” the report explained. “It’s possible this report is just a sprawling aloe plant or a mid-century modern maple credenza. You could try to study it more closely, but you will never know for certain.”

No word on whether or not things have been what they have seemed before this report or whether they will be what they seem at some point in the future.

And now, traffic.

There is a man walking out into the desert. He doesn’t have much. At one point he had a new job and a nice car and people in his life. Now he only has his gray pin-striped suit stained with dirt and a five-dollar bill. Soon, he thinks, he will have less. The less he has the more things make sense to him, although he doesn’t understand why.

He thinks back to the men he had been in the past. The man with a lover. The man with a job. The man driving without a destination. The man with a fancy watch in a place where time doesn’t work. The man standing out in the desert with blood all over his hands. The man entering a pawnshop. They all seemed to be different people, people who didn’t know each other although they might vaguely recognize each other from different corners at a party none of them liked.

But he also knew that they were all him, that all of them still lived inside his body, somewhere. That they could never leave, just recede into a background hum in his mind.

The young man is in the desert. He is looking back at a world that does not belong to him. Nothing belongs to him. He is looking around at a landscape that desolates outward forever. So he stops where he is, as good as any other place.

He looks up. Again, it is there in the sky. The planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It is very close now. So close that he wonders if he could touch it. As he reaches up, he thinks he sees movement on its surface. Through the canopy of the forests and upon the slopes of the mountains and on the shores of the churning ocean. People maybe. Crowds of people all wrapped in white cloth. They are leaning into each other like dropped puppets. They sway lifelessly. He feels horror in the back of his throat, but still he reaches up.

He can’t help himself. It’s just what he does next.

This has been traffic.

And now a word from our sponsors.

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This has been a message from our sponsors.

Oh, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned my boyfriend Carlos on the air before, but…