You miss 100% of the shots. Welcome to Night Vale

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners. A bad one. Possible injuries. Probable injuries even. A man who had been watering his lawn has laid down the hose and started sprinting toward the crash. His mouth is wide, and his lower teeth are more visible than they have ever been outside of the dentist visits that he doesn’t do as regularly as he should, if he’s honest with himself. He tries to be honest with himself. He rarely fully is.

A woman who had been one car back from the crash is vibrating. It’s the chemicals in her blood. When she saw the crash, she knew that in a set of circumstances that are terrifyingly similar to the ones that happened, it would have been her in that wreck. In the twist and the rend of it. Her flesh caught between this and that, split open, smeared. Her teeth chatter as she thinks of it, as she thinks of injuries she doesn’t have, consequences she won’t have to face.

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners. And it could have been any of us. But it wasn’t most of us. Our lucky day, then.

More soon, but first the headlines.

An update on the Randy Newman Memorial Night Vale Airport. There was some embarrassment earlier this month when it turned out that, after the expensive and high profile construction of a new terminal, the management of the airport never contracted with any airlines to have flights into or out of Night Vale.

Well, this oversight has been corrected. Night Vale Airport CEO Archie Lavery is proud to announce that he has made an agreement with Dale Lucero, whose wife, Betty, coaches the Little League team. Dale has an old Cessna he likes to take out on weekends when it isn’t too cloudy or windy, and he figures that he can get most people pretty much where they want to go on most days, if they’re a little patient.

“This old bird don’t fly quite like she used to,” Dale said, chewing on a straw and leaning on a plane that appeared to have been last painted during the Brando administration. “But I reckon she’s still got some sky left in her.”

When asked about international flights, Dale admitted that he hasn’t gotten his passport renewed after that trip to Antigua in ‘95, and so he probably couldn’t help anyone with that. And he was obligated to point out that his pilot license was a certificate he printed off a site called “Fun Pilot Props For Children Ages 3-5”. But still, he said it should totally be fine, and no one should be worried at all. “Ain’t never killed no one yet!” he said, with a grin that kept stretching wider and wider as his eyes watered with the strain of his distending face. “Triple negative there, boss. How you like ‘at?” Dale muttered to the sky.

Airport CEO Archie Lavery added “I’m excited about this new arrangement, and look forward to you all flying the friendless skies.”

Dr. Carlos Robles, dean of the University of What It Is, central Night Vale campus, and father to my child, has been consolidating control of the army of scientists now under his command. He has been doing the usual team-building exercises, like two truths and a lie, zip zap zop, and mock executions, but still there are certain left over resentments and confused thinking from the era overseen by that villain herself, Dr. Janet Lubelle.

Carlos needs his team to all be on the same, you know, team, because he has great things in store for them.

Many of you were worried about how I’ve been after finding out that Carlos had been stuck in that terrible desert other world for ten years, rather than the one year that I experienced. And it was tough to know that he hadn’t trusted me enough to help him carry that pain. But I understand why love might make someone feel that they need to keep such terrible secrets to themselves, that some secrets are so painful that to share them is itself an act of violence.

But now we can all share the weight of his secret, can show him there is no shame in having received pain, no guilt in a harrowing past. I love my husband, I do not hold it against him even a little that he could not tell me, and I will support him in any way that I know how.

In any case, understandably, he wants to know more about this world that held him for a decade of his life, and so he is mustering the considerable forces of the University of What It Is to that end. Soon, hopefully, we will know more about that terrible other place.

More on science, as soon as science continues to occur.

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners.

A real smash up. Glittering debris running down the street. As it happens, over two million years ago, during a different age of the earth, there was a stream here, clear blue water. And it ran exactly where this trail of glass is now. No one involved in the crash knows that, nor any of the witnesses. That information wouldn’t be helpful to them now.

The only information that might be helpful to them is more practical, such as: how to staunch bleeding? How to deal with visible bone, both in terms of wound repair and psychological impact? How to retain senses when your body is trying to shut down? This is the information that is needed. History exists right until the present insists upon itself, and then past and future fade until the present ceases being an emergency.

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue. There is blood, although I don’t know its location or quantity. There is a hand reaching, although I don’t know if it is reaching out or in.

I will give you more updates as I have them.

And now for a word from our sponsors.

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There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners

Something is trying to crawl out of the wreckage. This might have once been someone, but they have been reduced to something, and still they are trying to crawl. A man who had been watering his lawn nearby arrives at the wreckage. He sees what is trying to come out of it. And he is torn between wanting to flee and wanting to help. He decides to help.

In fiction, we assume that humans are cowardly. But in reality, humans are often generous and brave. We are a self-hating species, and like any self-hater, we are mostly incorrect.

The man gets down on his knees. He does his best to help, but he doesn’t know how. Nothing has prepared him for this. Nothing has prepared anyone for this. No one spends time learning about the possibility of this, even though the possibility is always there, always present, behind even the quietest, most comfortable moments of our lives. Catastrophe is, after all, only a catastrophe away.

And now for the music charts.

Number one with a bullet is of course “Help Me, I’m A Time Traveler Lost In History and I Need To Get A Message To My Superiors in the Future in the Form of a Hit Song” by Justin Beiber. I can’t stop humming it. Like:

[hums atonally]

Ok, I don’t have a great ear for melody, but it’s something like that. You know the song, you don’t need me to tell you.

After that we have a newcomer on our list, Night Vale’s own Michelle Nguyen with “Music Song” a piece she put together using a new-for-her system in which she uses music to compose a song. When asked about her groundbreaking technique, Michelle said “I thought I was post-music, but then I got bored of listening to trees grow and 40-hour white noise compilations. So I become post-post-music, and it turns out music is pretty good. I am glad to have invented it, and please feel free to compliment me about it whenever I am feeling insecure, which is a lot of the time,” Michelle concluded.

Well, Michelle, personally I think music is ok, and I’m glad you invented it.

Finally, of course, we have “Basket Case” by Green Day, which has been number three on our charts for over 60 years, long before the band released it. No matter what we do, it is just right there in the third spot. At least it got a little less confusing for us after the song came out.

This has been the charts.

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners.

A haze in the air that looks like smoke, but it is not smoke, it is finely pulverized glass, and it scatters with even a slight breeze. The hand of something that was once someone reaches out from the wreckage. The woman, one car back from the crash, exits her vehicle. Her mouth is open, but she is not making a sound. She doesn’t know what sound she could make. Nothing she can do can adequately express her horror at what she has seen. The man on his knees has given up on trying to help the thing that once was human. He looks past the crawling, mewling creature, and sees something he does not understand. The interior is twisted around itself, but it looks as though it goes much deeper than the car once did. If he didn’t know better, the man would think this was a tunnel. In fact, he doesn’t know better, and he does think it’s a tunnel. He crawls uncertainly forward, past the hand that is begging for aid, past the creature that once was human, deep into the wreckage, deeper into the wreckage, until the sound of the world fades away, and it grows dark and warm and damp.

More soon on….well, whatever it is that is happening here. But first, and always, the weather.

[WEATHER]

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue, listeners.

The man who had been watering his lawn crawls through the long belly of the wreckage. It is dark and warm and damp, and then, as he continues to move, it grows dark and cold and dry. He hears a voice, as though there is someone beside him as he crawls. The voice says: “Ah, it’s you again.”

“Who is that?” asks the man.

The voice replies: “It’s just me again.”

“I don’t know who you are,” the man says.

And then, from directly in front of him, so close he can feel cold breath on his face, smelling of grass clippings and graveyard dirt, the voice says “Don’t you?”

The man howls and tries to scramble backwards. As he does, he finds himself in a hospital hallway. The light through the window at the end of the hall is sunset golden. He turns and cannot find the tunnel he entered through. The man calls out, but no one answers. This hospital is empty. He walks to the end of the hall, enters a door marked exit, and finds himself at a school. It is 1974. He is 12 years old and he is late for class. He runs as the bell rings, but it is no use. He is and has always been late.

When he finally opens the loud, squeaky door, the teacher shakes her head in disappointment. “Find your desk,” she says, and that is tricky, because he doesn’t remember which one was his desk. There are three that are empty. He walks toward one, and no one calls out in correction, and so he sits down.

“Good,” his teacher says, in a new voice, a voice that is so familiar. “Now let’s begin the lesson.”

And with that, the man is back in the tunnel. But now there is daylight ahead of him, the lulling sound of traffic. He scrambles toward it, afraid that the voice will come again. With both hands, he grabs the frame of the wreckage and hauls himself back out. He finds himself in the seat of a car. There is a steering wheel in front of him. He glances with confusion in his rearview mirror and sees the woman one car back singing along to the hit, new song by Michelle Nguyen. The song makes her very happy, a respite of a commute in a tedious, busy day, and he smiles at her happiness. Then he looks again to the intersection before him, and he starts his left turn.

When it happens, it is so quick he doesn’t even know it is happening. He only knows that he is back in the wreckage and that he is no longer someone, but something. He tries to crawl out, but he can only reach out a hand and a familiar man on a nearby front lawn drops his hose and starts running over.

There was a car crash on Buellton Avenue. There is a car crash on Buellton Avenue. There will always be a car crash on Buellton Avenue.

Stay tuned next for Fallout Boy’s new cover of “The Disintegration Loops.”

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.