by Joseph Fink
It would be safe to assume that the house is an enclosed structure owned and built by people.
It would be weird to assume that the house has a personality, a soul. Why would anyone assume that? It is true. It does. But that was weird to assume that. Never assume that kind of thing.
Another way it is unlike other houses is its thoughts. Most houses do not think. This house has thoughts. Those thoughts are not visible in a picture. Nor in person. But they find their way into the world. Through dreams mostly. While a person sleeps, the house might suddenly have a thought: Taupe is not an emotional catalyst. It’s practical and bland. No one cries at any shade of taupe. Or another thought like OMG time! What is time even? And the sleeping person might experience that thought too.
These thoughts may also be shared in the shower. Grumpy thoughts. Angry thoughts. Thoughts that should be unthought before interacting with the public. Thoughts like [low guttural growl] or [knuckles crack, fists clench, teeth tighten, eyes stop letting in any new information, and water runs down a rigid face].
The thoughts are everywhere. Sometimes they are quite literal and utilitarian. There’s a rodent chewing on some drywall behind the headboard could be one such thought.
Another way it is not unlike other houses is that it houses people. It houses a woman, for instance.
Imagine a woman.
Good work.
It also houses a boy, not quite a man. He’s fifteen. You know how it is.
Imagine a fifteen-year-old boy.
Nope. That was not right at all. Try again.
No.
No.
Okay, stop.
He is tall. He’s skinny, with short hair and long teeth that he deliberately hides when he smiles. He smiles more than he thinks he does.
Imagine a fifteen-year-old boy.
No. Again.
No. Not close.
He has fingers that move like they have no bones. He has eyes that move like he has no patience. He has a tongue that changes shape every day. He has a face that changes shape every day. He has a skeletal structure and coloring and hair that change every day. He seems different than you remember. He is always unlike he was before.
Imagine.
Good. That’s actually pretty good.
His name is Josh Crayton.
Her name is Diane Crayton. She is Josh’s mother. She sees herself in Josh.
Josh looks like a lot of things. He changes his physical form constantly. In this way he is unlike most boys his age. He thinks he is several things at once, many of them contradictory. In this way he is like most boys his age.
Sometimes Josh takes the form of a curve-billed thrasher, or a kangaroo, or a Victorian-era wardrobe. Sometimes he amalgamates his looks: fish head with ivory tusks and monarch wings.
“You have changed so much since I last saw you,” people often say to him. People say that to all teenagers, but they mean it more with Josh.
Josh doesn’t remember how he looked the last time each person saw him. Like most teenagers, he always was what he happens to be in that moment, until he never was that.
There was a girl Josh liked who only liked Josh when he was bipedal. Josh does not like always being bipedal and found this news disappointing. There was a boy Josh liked who liked Josh when he was a cute animal. Josh always likes being a cute animal, but Josh’s subjective sense of the word cute was different than the boy’s. This was another disappointment for Josh, and also for the boy, who did not find giant centipedes cute at all.
Diane loved Josh for all of the things he appeared to be. She herself did not change forms, only showing the gradual differences that come with gradual changes of age.
Josh sometimes tried to fool Diane by taking the form of an alligator, or a cloud of bats, or a house fire.
Diane knew to be on guard at first, just in case there really was a dangerous reptile, or swarm of rabid flying mammals, or a house on fire. But once she understood the situation, she was calm, and she loved him for who he was and how he looked. No matter what he looked like. She was, after all, the mother of a teenager.
“Please stop shrieking and swarming into the cupboards,” she would say. It was important to set boundaries.
Josh sometimes appears human. When he does, he is often short, chubby-cheeked, pudgy, wearing glasses.
“Is that how you see yourself, Josh?” Diane once asked.
“Sometimes,” Josh replied.
“Do you like the way you look?” Diane once followed up.
“Sometimes,” Josh replied.
Diane did not press Josh further. She felt his terse answers were a sign he did not want to talk much.
Josh wished his mother talked to him more. His short answers were a sign he didn’t know how to socialize well.
“What?” Josh asked on a Tuesday evening. He had smooth violet skin, a pointed chin, angular thin shoulders.
The television was not on. A textbook was open but not being read. A phone was lit up, a sharp thumb tapping across its keyboard.
“Come talk,” Diane said from the cracked door. She did not want to open it all the way. It was not her room. She was trying very hard. She had sold a tear to Jackie that day. It had felt good to have someone explicitly value something that she did. Also, expenses had been higher than usual that month and she had needed the money. She was, after all, a single parent.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
“I’m studying.”
“Are you studying? I don’t want to bother you if you are studying.”
“Ping,” the phone added.
“If you’re studying, then I’ll go,” she said, pretending she did not hear the phone.
“What?” Josh asked on some other evening. It was a Tuesday, or it was not a Tuesday. His skin was a pale orange. Or it was deep navy. Or there were thick bristles that plumed from just below his eyes. Or his eyes were not visible at all because of the shade of his ram-like horns. This was most evenings. This was the incremental repetition of parenting.
The television was not on. A textbook was open but not being read. A phone was lit up.
“How are you doing?” Diane sometimes said.
Sometimes she said, “What’s going on?”
Sometimes she said, “Just checking on you.”
“Josh,” Diane sometimes said, standing at his door, in the evening. Sometimes she knocked. “Josh,” she sometimes repeated following a certain amount of silence. “Josh,” she sometimes did not repeat following a second amount of silence.
“Dot dot dot,” Josh sometimes replied. Not out loud, but like in a comic book speech-bubble. He pictured other things he could say, but did not know how.
For the most part, I do not like taffeta, the house thought, and Diane shared that thought.
“Josh,” Diane said, sitting in the passenger seat of her burgundy Ford hatchback.
“What?” said the wolf spider in the driver’s seat.
“If you’re going to learn to drive, you’re going to need to be able to reach the pedals.”
The wolf spider elongated, and two of his middle legs extended to the floor of the vehicle, gently touching the pedals.
“And see the road too, Josh.”
A human head with the face and hair of a fifteen-year-old boy emerged from the body of the spider, and the abdomen filled out into something of a primate-like torso. The legs remained spindly and long. He thought he looked cool driving a car as a wolf spider. He did look cool, although it was difficult to control the car. It was important to him that he look cool while driving, although he would not have been able to articulate why.
Diane stared him down. Josh took a fully human shape, save for a few feathers on his back and shoulders. Diane saw them poking out from underneath his shirtsleeves but decided that not all battles are worth fighting.
“Human form when driving the car.”
Diane saw herself in Josh. She had been a teenager once. She understood emotions. She empath
ized. She didn’t know with what, but she empathized.
Josh huffed, but Diane reminded him that if he wanted to drive her car, he would play by her rules, which involved not being a three-inch-long wolf spider. Diane reminded him of his bike and how that was a perfectly reasonable form of transportation.
Diane’s task of teaching her son to drive took additional patience, not just because of Josh’s insistence on constant reassessment of his physical identity but also because the car was a manual transmission.
Imagine teaching a fifteen-year-old how to drive a car with manual transmission. First, you have to press down the clutch. Then you have to whisper a secret into one of the cup holders. In Diane’s case, this was easy, as she was not a very social or public person, and most any mundane thing in her life could be a secret. In Josh’s case this was hard, because for teenagers most every mundane thing in their lives is a secret that they do not like sharing in front of their parents.
Then, after the clutch and the secret, the driver has to grab the stick shift, which is a splintered wood stake wedged into the dashboard, and shake it until something happens—anything really—and then simultaneously type a series of code numbers into a keyboard on the steering wheel. All this while sunglasses-wearing agents from a vague yet menacing government agency sit in a heavily tinted black sedan across the street taking pictures (and occasionally waving). This is a lot of pressure on a first-time driver.
Josh often got frustrated with his mother. This was because Diane was not the best teacher. This was also because Josh was not the best student. There were other reasons as well.
“Josh, you need to listen to me,” Diane would say.
“I get it. I get it, okay,” Josh would say, not getting it at all.
Diane enjoyed arguing with Josh about driving, because it was time spent talking, having a relationship. It was not easy, being a mother to a teenager. Josh enjoyed this time too, but not consciously. On the surface, he was miserable. He just wanted to drive a car, not do all of the things it takes to be able to drive a car, like having a car and learning to drive it.
And sometimes he would say, “Why can’t my dad come teach me?” because he knew that question hurt her. Then he would feel bad about hurting her. Diane would feel bad too. They would sit in the car, feeling bad.
“You’re doing a good job,” Diane once said to Josh, in relation to nothing, only trying to fill a silence.
So every other time, I’m not doing a good job, Josh thought, because he didn’t understand the context of her statement.
“Thanks,” Josh said out loud, trying to fill the silence with graciousness.
“You still need to work on a lot of things,” Diane did not say. “I’m sorry your father isn’t here,” she also did not say. “But I am trying so, so hard. I am, Josh. I am, I am, I am,” she did not say. As far as things go, her self-control was pretty good.
I’m really good at driving, Josh often thought, even as he veered too close to highway barriers, rolled wheels up on curbs, and failed to yield to hooded figures, resulting in mandatory citywide ennui for hours. Night Vale’s traffic laws are byzantine and kept on a need-to-know basis with civilian drivers.
Their driving lessons often ended in a “Good job” and a “Thanks” and a brief pause and a divergence into separate silent rooms. Later Diane would knock and say, “Josh,” and Josh would or would not reply.
Diane hurt. She was not consciously aware that she hurt, but she hurt. “Josh,” she said, so many times a day, for so many different reasons.
Josh loved his mother but he did not know why.
Diane loved her son and she did not care why.
Another way the house is unlike other houses is it has a faceless old woman secretly living in it, although that is not important to this story.
3
“KING CITY,” said the paper.
Jackie had never felt fear in her entire life. She had felt caution, and unease, and sadness, and joy, which are all similar to fear. But she had never felt fear itself.
She did not feel it then.
She got to the work of closing: wiping down the bathroom sink, sweeping the floor, and adjusting the thick burlap covering up items that were forbidden or secret, like the time machine that Larry Leroy had stolen from the Museum of Forbidden Technologies, and the pens and pencils (writing utensils having long been outlawed in Night Vale for reasons of public well-being, although everyone still surreptitiously used them).
The paper was still in her hand. She hadn’t realized it, had been going about everything without realizing, but there it was. Still there. Dull pencil. Smudged. Hurried handwriting. She put it down on the cracked glass of the countertop.
Now it was time to feed those items that were alive. Some of the items were alive. Some of them were dogs, and some weren’t.
There were lights now, in the desert. Low bubbles of light coming and going. She had never seen them before. She ignored them, as she ignored all things that were not part of the small circle of her days.
There were always things she had never seen before in Night Vale. There was the man she passed in the desert using a pair of scissors on the top of a cactus, as if he were cutting its hair. There was the cactus that had a full head of hair. There was the day where the small crack that’s always visible in the sky suddenly opened up, and several pterodactyls flew out. Later it was revealed they were just pteranodons, and all the panic was for nothing.
She finished her check of the inventory. The paper was in her hand.
“KING CITY,” said the paper.
How did it get there?
“How did this get here?” she asked. The dogs did not respond, nor did anything less sentient.
She put the paper in a drawer in the back room, in the desk she did not use for the work she did not have.
There was nothing more to be done to close the shop. If she were honest, and she tried to be, she had been looking for excuses not to leave. If she were honest, and she tried to be, the floor had been clean enough to begin with. A glance out the window. The low bubbles of light in the desert were gone. Nothing there but a distant airplane crawling across the sky, red blinking lights, vulnerable in the vast empty, faint red beacons flashing the message HELLO. A SMALL ISLAND OF LIFE UP HERE, VERY CLOSE TO SPACE. PRAY FOR US. PRAY FOR US.
The paper was in her hand.
“KING CITY,” the paper said.
Jackie felt fear for the first time, and she did not know what it was.
For the first time in a long time, she wished she had a friend to call. She had had friends in high school, she knew that, although the memory of high school was distant and vague. The rest of her friends hadn’t stopped at nineteen. They had gotten older, living full lives. They had tried to stay in touch, but it was difficult as they moved on to adult careers and kids and retirement and Jackie just kept being nineteen years old.
“So, still nineteen?” Noelle Connolly had said, when they spoke on the phone for the final time. Her disapproval was clear in her voice. “Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?”
They had been friends since sophomore Spanish class, but Noelle had been fifty-eight at the point she had finally asked Jackie that question, and spoke in tones that felt sickeningly parental to Jackie. Jackie had said so, and Noelle had become openly condescending, and they had both hung up, and she and Noelle had never spoken again. People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.
The radio came on by itself as she stood there, paper in hand. It always did at this time of night. Cecil Palmer, the host of Night Vale Community Radio, spoke to her. News, the community calendar, traffic.
She listened when she could to Cecil. Most of the town did. At home, Jackie had a small radio, only about two feet wide, a foot and a half tall. It was the lightweight portable edition (“under 14 lbs.!”) with a mother-of-pearl handle and sharply angled, open-beaked eagles carved into the upper corners.
; Her mother had gotten it for her whenever her sixteenth birthday was, however long ago that had been, and it was one of Jackie’s favorite possessions, along with her record collection, which she never listened to because she didn’t have a license to own a record player yet.
Cecil Palmer spoke of the horrors of everyday life. Nearly every broadcast told a story of impending doom or death, or worse: a long life lived in fruitless fear of doom or death. It wasn’t that Jackie wanted to know all of the bad news of the world. It was that she loved sitting in the dark of her bedroom, swaddled in blankets and invisible radio waves.
Look, life is stressful. This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life. Births, deaths, comings, goings, the gulf of subjectivity and bravado between us and everyone we care about. All is sorrow, as a man once said without really doing much about it.
But when Cecil talked it was possible to let some of that go. To let go of the worries. To let go of the questions. To let go of letting or going.
The slip of paper, however, Jackie could not let go of. She opened her hand, and watched it flutter to the floor. She stared at it. It was on the floor. “Dot dot dot,” the blank back of the paper said, not literally, but like in a comic book speech-bubble. She stared and stared, and it sat and sat, and then she blinked her eyes and it was back in her hand.
“KING CITY,” it said.
“This is getting me nowhere,” she said, to no one, or to the dogs, or to the Thing that lurked in her corner.
She tried calling Cecil at the station, to see if he had heard anything about a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase. She couldn’t remember Cecil ever mentioning a person by that description on his show, but it was worth a shot.