I hope this cursed video cassette finds you well. Welcome to Night Vale.

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Elliott Fonseca sits at the end of a metal bench. He is hunched over a dry, brown maple leaf. His eyes trace the patterns, and he wonders if the veins on a leaf work the same as veins in a human body. He hasn’t taken Bio 1 yet in high school. He chose Physics and Chemistry instead.

But now he wonders if he should have taken biology, even though he wouldn’t have been able to dissect a frog or pick apart an owl pellet. Elliott has a weak constitution when it comes to the fragility of life. He knows, in theory, that all life must end, but he’d rather not think about that while he’s only 15 years old.

He’d rather think about how leaves work. In particular, this leaf, which seems oddly out of place, as there are not many trees near the stadium. And none of them, Elliott guesses, are maple trees. Maybe it’s not a maple leaf, though it looks a lot like the one on the Canadian flag.

Elliott loves flags. He knows all the flags of the world. Cuba and Puerto Rico have the same flag but the red and blue are reversed. Romania and Chad have the same tricolor, as do Indonesia and Monaco, though theirs are just red and white. Bhutan has the coolest flag, Elliott believes, because it has a dragon on it. So does the flag of Luftnarp, but in Bhutan, the dragon is the whole thing, while in Luftnarp, the dragon is very small, and it’s wearing a business suit to celebrate Luftnarp’s deep and abiding love of making deals.

Elliott wants to go to Bhutan someday. He knows it’s near China and Nepal. He also knows that it’s mountainous. He can tell because his grandpa had one of those globes that was all bumpy with topography, even though the scale isn't at all accurate. If the Himalayas were that tall in real life, they’d be bumping into satellites and stuff.

The last time he saw his grandpa was spring break when he was 11. Elliott still remembers that they ate cake and watched an old western. Bad Day at Black Rock. Elliott doesn’t remember the movie very well, but he liked the title. Sometimes things just can’t live up to their names. Like head cheese or sweetbread or fun runs. Bad Day at Black Rock sounds good, but it is boring.

Elliott’s grandpa had seen the movie a dozen times before. Instead of watching the movie himself, Elliott watched the old man watch the movie, and even he didn’t seem that taken by it. Maybe his grandpa found comfort in the film, like an old friend or a cozy shirt that's quite ugly and maybe smells a little bit. Not every moment has to feel special in order to be special.

In Elliott’s mind, that sentence makes perfect sense.

“Eighteen!” someone shouts in the distance. Elliott doesn’t hear it, or doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s wondering how old the maple tree is that lost this leaf. How many leaves has the tree grown and lost in its life.

“Eighteen!” comes the shout again, and Elliott is grabbed from behind. He’s pushed hard in the back and he stumbles out onto the painted grass under bright halogen lights. Someone cusses at him supportively. He gets it. He’s needed.

He jogs across the field to another boy who is crouched down. The boy is looking at Elliott. Elliott taps his own hip twice, and the other boy turns his face. There are several shouts and soon Elliot performs a sort of dance. A single move of four steps and a kick, and everyone dressed like him turns away to watch a ball fly through the air. They all stare at it until their shoulders slump. They pat Elliott on the rump and say supportive things, but without cussing. The crowd claps politely.

Elliott wonders why the moon is the way it is.

###

He sits back down on his metal bench, far away from the others. It’s cold and breezy out. Nearby are the reverberant sounds of trumpets and drums, a soundtrack to teenagers playfully demonstrating violence. He doesn’t notice any of this, because his leaf is gone.

It’s just a leaf, but still he feels sad. He shared a moment with it and had no chance to say goodbye. The leaf wouldn’t care, but Elliott does. Closure is a you-problem, his older sister, Eva, might have said if she cared about things like closure. She mostly cared about oversized hoodies and video games.

He doesn't like Eva, not at all. She goes to the same school as Elliott but has different friends. Elliott wished he still lived with her, but if he had to choose which sibling to live with, he very much prefers his little brother, Henry, who lives with Elliott and their dad. So, that’s kind of good.

Two weeks ago in physics, Mr. Yu told the class that time travel isn’t possible, and that hurt Elliott. But shortly after that Mr. Yu said that, well, some forms of time travel are possible, just not like in the movies. And Elliott raised his hand, and everyone looked shocked because Elliott never raised his hand. Mr. Yu smiled and said, “Elliott. You have a question?’

And Elliott asked “what kinds of time travel are possible?” He was eager, expectant. He still believed. Still wanted to believe.

But Mr. Yu went on and on about how the light we see from the stars is millions if not billions of years old. We can’t interact with what has already happened, but we can look to the stars to understand the history of the universe, and that is so remarkable, Mr. Yu said, because we could never actually see with our own eyes what happened during the Roman Empire or the Ming Dynasty or the Revolutionary blah blah blah blah.

Elliott had stopped listening to Mr. Yu, because it was boring to think that stars are a kind of old movie. Bad Day at Black Rock? Great title, dumb picture. The Cosmos? What’s in a name?

Nothing apparently.

Elliott believes that time travel has to be possible. He read in a book once that Time isn’t a line, it’s a curtain. You have to find the folds and creases and you can step right through it. But before you do that, you have to know when and where you want to go.

Elliott wants to go back to when he was 8 years old, and his mom took him and Eva and Henry to these underground caves. It was dark and damp in those caves, and Elliott almost panicked because he was scared of the dark and small spaces. But once he relaxed into the experience, he felt so alive. The earth is gorgeous on the inside. It’s hard and cruel and beautiful, like his mother, and he loved them both so very much for being that way.

Two weeks after the trip to the caves, his mom and dad split up. He and Henry now lived with dad, while Eva lived with mom. He liked Henry far more than he liked Eva. But he liked his dad far less than he liked his mom. He still got to see her, because they all lived in the same neighborhood, but nothing was really the same after the caves.

His dad got a girlfriend named Louisa, and she is a good person but uninteresting. Bad Day at Black Rock. She doesn’t hold Elliott like his real mom. She doesn’t kiss him or know his favorite bands. She doesn’t take him shopping for clothes. She doesn't look him in the eye when she talks to him. She talks to him like an adult, which is nice, but also lousy because he's not an adult and doesn't want to be one until he has to be. Louisa could never love Elliott the way he wants to be loved, and they both know it. That’s not the awful part. The awful part is that Louisa is dad's girlfriend and not Elliott's mom.

###

The moon is actually a bad name for that thing, Elliott thinks, as a boy wearing the same uniform as him runs past him down the sideline while being chased by other boys who are yelling curse words in a non-supportive way.

The moon is a really interesting thing with a bad title. He bets the moon has seen a lot, probably knows a lot. If the moon were sentient, which it couldn't be because that doesn't make sense. But if the moon were sentient, it probably could explain time travel to Elliott much better than Mr. Yu.

Elliott loved those caves so much. And maybe if he could go back there, he could talk to his mom and tell her not to leave dad. Or if she absolutely had to leave dad, she could be convinced to have Eva live with dad. That way, he and Henry could live with her.

He worries about Henry. Henry is different since mom and Eva left. Henry reminded Elliott of the moon, because he was constantly moving around but in a really predictable way. These days, Henry reminds Elliott of a scorpion, which is the word on the front of Elliott's jersey. Henry doesn't come out of his room very often, but on those rare occasions, he does or says something mean. It's not ideal.

"Eighteen!" Coach Jimenez shouts, and Elliott stands up. He looks up at the moon as he jogs and asks it if it remembers the day he went to the caves.

He's obsessing over the caves. Well, specifically, he's obsessing over time travel to go back to the caves. But they went to the caves only two weeks before mom moved out. That’s not enough time to make any real change. Should he go back to when he was 5, really give himself a long deadline?

No. He needs to put a clock on it. That’s not exactly the way Elliott phrases it in his own head, but you, dear listener, know what I mean.

The caves would be the right time and place to go back to. Elliott digs his cleat into the dirt and watches the indentation form in the soft soil. He digs more and more, and a hole develops. He's standing on the field a few yards behind the boy who crouches down. The boy wants to know if Elliott is ready to kick the extra point, and Elliott taps his own hip twice. He stares at the hole he made and wonders if there are caves below Night Vale. He does his sort of dance, though his heart isn't in it. Still, people cheer and all of the boys wearing the same outfit as him slap him hard around the back and butt and head. They shout curse words in a very loving and appreciative manner.

Someone blows a whistle. Hundreds of people in the stands cheer, and a band plays a halftime show

###

Halftime show

###

Mr. Yu said that time and space are linked, but in perfect balance, like the self-contained yin and yang symbol. If you increase time, you decrease space, and that made perfect sense to Elliott because he didn’t think any harder about it. If he did, it would have all fallen apart in his head. Great scientists over the last century have struggled to build models for understanding this topic, and yet here's a high school student who doesn't even know how leaves work thinking he has a full grasp of spacetime.

He wishes Mr. Yu were here, because now he has questions about the moon. Why do we only see the one side? Does the moon not spin? If Coach Jimenez would let him bring his phone to the sideline, Elliott could look it up and be done with it. But Coach Jimenez doesn't like Elliott, because he doesn't like any of his players.

Coach seems to love his players though, and that makes sense to Elliott. You can love someone and not like them.

Elliott loves Eva but he doesn't really like her. He's never slapped her across the back and shouted encouraging curse words at her like coach does, but there are lots of other ways to show love.

He had hugged her tightly at grandpa's funeral. She was grandpa's special grandchild. Henry was too young and energetic for grandpa to enjoy in his later years. And Elliott doesn't really talk much. Grandpa liked to talk, like Eva.

Elliott wonders if time travel isn't a physical act but a mental act. Instead of a time machine, you could convince your brain that you were living in that time once again. You would have to concentrate really hard so that the thoughts would feel real. That's just kind of a dream, though, right? Elliott thinks. But one you get to stay in forever, and that's scary because isn't that just not waking up, which is another way to say you're dead?

This is true if you think you're actually living your own real life right now. Life is but a dream. Why is that line in a song about rowing your boat? That's stupid that they did that, Elliott realizes. He wants to know about the reality of existence, OR he wants to know about watercrafts. It's confusing to mix the two.

"Eighteen!" someone shouts along with some supportive and loving cusses.

Elliott had this dream once, actually a couple of times, that he was an old man and Henry (also an old man in the dream) was in jail. It was never clear how Henry got put in jail. Elliott's unconscious mind wasn't much for developing plot. His dreams were less narrative fiction and more like tone poems.

But while the dreams never established why, when, or how Henry got arrested, Elliott worries that there's another reality where Henry is a bad person and gets into too much trouble. There must be a way to stop this before it happens.

"Eighteen!"

Elliott hears his number this time and he runs onto the field. The crowd is unusually quiet. His teammates look scared. Elliott thinks there's plenty of reasons to be scared, but not this visibly so. He wonders if they've been thinking about the moon or time travel or alternate realities within the unconscious mind.

No one is lining up, and someone in the huddle says there's a timeout.

Coach Jimenez is on the field telling his players he loves them by shouting curses at them and reminding them that no one believed they could beat Red Mesa, yet here they are in the final second of a two point game.

He looks at Elliott and says "Fonseca, we got your back. Make us proud." I'm paraphrasing because the coach also crammed in 2 f-words and somehow the s-word into those two sentences.

Elliott looks over the coach’s shoulder at the moon, and beyond it the Cosmos. He can't see the stars because of the stadium lights, but he knows he's not missing anything. They're just old movies. Whatever the stars are doing happened a long time ago and there's not a thing he can do to change it. Bad Day at Black Rock will always be boring. Elliott can't fix it.

He understands that time is linear and that the stars take longer to reveal their lives than the moon, which takes longer than Elliott and the players around him to show the world who they are.

We are what we are, Elliott thinks. We’re either interesting or we are not. We are good or we are not. We are loved or we are not.

A whistle blows and the teams line up at the 18 yard line. Elliott stands 7 yards back on the left hash. He taps his hip twice and the snap is away. Four steps into his sort of dance and the kick is up.

Elliott Fonseca remembers that his mother's birthday is next weekend, and there will be a party, and he will ask her and dad to move back in together. Or at least to let him and Henry come live with her. He knows it will not work, but he can’t go back in time and space. He can’t go back to the caves to tell her this before she left dad.

There is a loud buzzing sound and someone tackles Elliott. More people tackle him. They scream loudly in his ear. They're saying "You did it" but with very loving and supportive curse words added to their phrasing. Someone shouts “District champs!"

They lift Elliott onto their shoulders and carry him away. Elliott looks at the moon and wonders if it has underground caves, too.

This has been sports.

Stay tuned next for a post-game pizza party.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

###

PROVERB: Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. It’s after labor day. That's so gauche.