Two heads are better than one. Especially in a carnival sideshow.

Welcome to Night Vale.

In our town, there is a truck. Right now, it’s cruising slowly down Desert Elm Drive. The reflections of leafy branches slide up and over the windshield as it moves along. A loudspeaker on the roof plays a tune you’ve heard a million times before but can never remember the name of. It might be from a classical piece or an old TV sitcom or a lullaby your grandmother made up. Sometimes the song changes, but no matter what it is, you always know it well and you can never remember its name.

One side of the truck is covered with stickers, some colorful, some faded, some pasted over top of others.

Stenciled in bubble letters above the stickers is the phrase: ICE CREAM = HAPPINESS, with an asterisk after “happiness.” Written in fine print is the phrase: These Statements Not Evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Inside the truck, there is a man. He has soulful, empathetic eyes. He rarely speaks because he knows there is little he can say. There is little he can offer except an outstretched arm holding a frozen novelty. That’s what they’re called in the business. Novelties. This has always confused him because novelty usually means something different or unusual, and he provides the opposite: something familiar. Novelty usually means something inconsequential. But again, he provides the opposite—something of immeasurable consequence.

More on this after a public service announcement from the Crime and Safety Administration. For that, we go to Deb, a sentient patch of haze.

DEB: Hello friends. You may know me from paid commercial advertising on this program, but today, I’m bringing you a PSA. As in, I’m not getting any money for this one. And the reason for that is, I have to do a certain number of PSAs as community service hours for being falsely accused of the murder of Marcus Vanston a couple months back.

CECIL: (interjecting) Again, really sorry about that Deb.

DEB: Obviously I didn’t do it, but of course, even just being accused of a crime carries its own harsh sentence. And this is mine: doing a job I normally get paid for, except not getting paid for it. Which I will happily comply with, because I’ve always been passionate about serving my community, whenever it is required by law for me to do so. Friends, what I want to talk to you about today is ramming the shopping carts together really hard in the Ralph’s parking lot after school. Hey. Come on. Knock it off, you guys. This has been a message from the Crime and Safety Administration.

CECIL: Thanks, Deb! And I personally endorse that PSA. It’s all fun and games until someone ends up seriously harming one of those carts and then having an expensive personal injury lawsuit on their hands. Take it from someone who was young once too, and learned a few things the hard way.

In other announcements, I want to take the opportunity, on behalf of everyone here at Night Vale Community Radio, to give a big shoutout to our newest intern Jalen Rutherford, whose work at the station is tireless, as is his dedication to helping my friend Dana Cardinal solve murders. In all my time here, I’ve never had a more dedicated apprentice. It might have something to do with the fact that the original Jalen Rutherford died and was replaced by his doppelganger who blew in on the last sandstorm, and the new Jalen really wants to prove himself worthy of the life he’s taken over. But whatever his motivation is, he’s been doing a bang-up job on our filing system and website. He even said that he might be able to get the show streaming over the internet, potentially opening our little station up to a global audience—as opposed to our current audience, which is confined to the Greater Night Vale Area excluding Cactus Park if it’s windy out. Not sure if we’ll pursue that, but it’s an interesting idea.

Now back to our top story.

The ice cream man’s phone is ringing. He has a policy to never answer the phone while driving the truck, but the situation hasn’t come up before, so he’s never had to test his will power. He answers.

There’s the sound of a woman sobbing loudly in his ear, which makes him swerve.

“Hello?” he says. He already regrets answering the phone.

Another voice gets on the phone, and he can no longer hear the woman. You have to help, the new voice says. Your daughter was in a car accident. The ambulance needs money to take her to the hospital. Please give us your credit card information right away or your daughter will die here in a heap of twisted metal and broken glass. Her final words will be, why didn’t my father save me? Why did he let me die here alone on a strange street with no one to hold my hand or tell me they love me or that everything will be okay? Why would he let that happen to me when he promised to protect me always? Sir, please, your credit card information, right away.

The man sighs and gives the voice his credit card information. He doesn’t have a daughter, but he recognizes pain. The voice that’s speaking to him is in pain. He has dedicated his life to spreading happiness, to helping those in pain, because he knows that suffering isn’t karmic. It comes for all of us, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not we are good or bad people—though the voice on the phone may very well be a bad person. That isn’t for him to judge. He says goodbye and hangs up and vows to not answer the phone when he’s driving again.

He turns off Desert Elm Drive onto a street called Meridian. He turns off Meridian onto a street called Ash, then a dirt road without a name. The nameless road ends in a vacant cul-de-sac, and there, he stops. He turns off the engine. He tries to steady his nerves because he knows that when he turns the music back on, they will come.

But first, Household Hints.

Have you ever seen dust motes floating through the air on a shaft of sunlight? Have you ever wondered to yourself, wait, is that dust? It seems to be sparkling with an unnatural, glittery sheen. When you reach out to touch it, there’s a zap like electricity in your fingertips and it feels like a TV channel has been changed in your mind. At first, you can’t tell what’s different, only that something is. Then it dawns on you. You are no longer thinking or speaking or understanding your own language. It has been replaced by a totally new one. Not just new to you, but new in general, a language that no one has ever spoken before. Doctors and academics all agree that what you’re speaking isn’t nonsense—it has the cadence and grammar of a language, but there’s no translation for it. And since no one is particularly motivated to learn it, you’ll either have to learn an established language or content yourself with drawing pictures of whatever you want to communicate and making others do the same for you. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier to mix two parts water with one part white vinegar? Wouldn’t it have saved so much time to simply wipe down your household surfaces? There’s all kinds of dust out there, and ten minutes with a damp cloth can save you years of learning a new language. This has been Household Hints.

Now, back to the vacant cul-de-sac at the end of a nameless road.

Wind blows sand across the pavement. There used to be houses here. Tract houses that all looked exactly alike, lined up in alternating colors, yellow and orange and terra cotta red, all with matching brown tile roofs and flagstone walks and single car garages, all standing the exact same height against the cloudless sky. The only thing left of them now is the flagstone walks. They were overpriced for what they were, so no one ever bought one, and the houses were eventually torn down.

But when the houses were first built, the ice cream man had imagined it would be the perfect neighborhood for him to sell his novelties. I’ll go there every day, he thought, and drive around the loop, and the kids will all ride out on their shiny bicycles and ding their bells and the parents will wave hello from the windows and we’ll all make each others’ days a little brighter.

It didn’t end up happening that way. But for better or worse, this is his route.

He takes a deep breath and flips the switch on the music box. A familiar tune begins to play from the loudspeaker on the roof.

He fixes his stare on the empty horizon, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white, and waits.

The song swirls around the desert, carried on the breeze like pollen. A tumbleweed blows down the cul-de-sac, which startles a rabbit, who runs underneath the parked truck for cover. The rabbit knows that a tumbleweed isn’t dangerous, but fear feels the same whether it’s rational or not. Fear is the natural impulse of self preservation, and that’s a hard thing to resist, even when you know better.

The ice cream man moves to the back of the truck to open the freezer and check his goods. He doesn’t need to check, he checked them before he left this morning, but it’s part of the ritual. It centers him and gives him courage for what’s to come. Everything is organized and lined up in perfect rows, a rainbow of novelties in a misty vapor of dry ice.

He touches the cold packages one at a time, like prayer beads, then closes the freezer and returns to his seat.

There are silhouettes on the horizon now. Twenty, maybe twenty-five figures, all shambling toward him, drawn in from all directions by the looping song.

As they get closer, he can see how hungry they look. He can hear their rumbling stomachs and feel the warmth of their breath and see the gape of their mouths and the rolling whites of their eyes.

He will give them the ice cream first, but he knows it won’t be enough.

It never is.

Before we get to that—the weather.

[THE WEATHER]

The figures surround the truck, grunting and salivating. Even though this has happened many times before, the ice cream man is no less afraid. Fear is the natural impulse of self preservation and that’s a hard thing to resist—but that’s exactly what he must do. Hands reach through the open windows. The truck begins to rock. Some of them are wailing, some laughing hysterically, some gasping. The silent ones frighten him the most.

With shaking hands, the man gives them cones and bars and popsicles. The figures eat everything, even the plastic packaging and the wooden sticks. But they are still hungry.

One nips the ice cream man’s finger. It draws blood. Things happen fast after that.

The doors of the truck are forced open and the figures push their way in. The ice cream man is dragged to the pavement of the cul-de-sac in seconds. The freezer in the truck has been left open. Everything will melt, he thinks.

The figures tear into him, first with their claws, then with their teeth. They jerk him this way and that, like lions on a kudu. He fights through the horror of it because he knows that these are his customers and he’s bringing them happiness. Their favorite foods are fear and ice cream. And as long as they’re consuming him, they won’t tear into anyone else, so he’s bringing happiness to others too, indirectly, if happiness can be defined as avoiding suffering.

When there’s no flesh left on his body, they start in on the rest of him. They feast and chew and lick until the only thing remaining is a clean white skeleton, baking on the pavement of an abandoned cul-de-sac at the end of a nameless road. Then there’s nothing for the figures to do but lumber back the way they came, toward town. At least they won’t cause trouble there tonight. They’re satisfied for now.

The ice cream man’s cells grow slowly back onto his bones like barnacles. The regeneration hurts more than the destruction. He will have a long time to lie there, unable to do anything but feel.

When his eyes return to his sockets, he sees that the rabbit is gone from its refuge under the truck, but the tumbleweed is still here, caught in a storm grate. A tumbleweed is a skeleton too, he thinks. A tumbleweed is the bones of a thistle plant, designed to scatter seeds around the desert and spread life from its own corpse. We are the same, he thinks. But he knows that isn’t a perfect metaphor. He’s just lonely and wants to feel close to something, and the tumbleweed is the only other thing here.

When the ice cream man is finally whole again, he frees the tumbleweed from the storm grate and sends it on its way across the desert, then drives home. Back at his single-wide in Space #8 at the Hefty Sycamore Trailer Park, he refreezes his melted novelties and takes a long nap. Later, he sits in a lawn chair outside and watches the lights in the sky and eats a misshapen strawberry shortcake bar for dinner. He always looks forward to reading the joke on the stick afterward. Even though he’s read them all before, they still make him happy. An ice cream man’s job is happiness, and he takes his job seriously.

At the same time, he knows he’s been doing this for too long. He will have to retire soon. Before that happens, of course, he will need to choose a successor. The importance of the work is invisible, which can be frustrating at times. But that’s the reality. The right person will understand this. The right person will be an independent self-starter who’s passionate about customer service, able to fully regenerate their own body, and prepared to experience constant pain and terror during the course of an average workday.

That’s the description of the position, and those are the qualifications.

Interested candidates can drop off their resumes at the Hefty Sycamore Trailer Park, Space #8.

This has been job listings.

Stay tuned to schedule your interview. One at a time please, no pushing in line.

Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

PROVERB: Look what the cat dragged in. Oh ew, I think it’s still moving.