It was a fair question, although the problem with fair questions is that they are asked about an unfair world.

Sleep is confusing. Dreams are baffling. The concept of transitioning from one perceived reality to another is a tolerated madness.

Almost always we are all experiencing the same problems as everyone else,” said josie, “and pretending we don’t so that every one of us thinks we are alone.

You’re a good one, jackie fierro,” they said. “and that makes the world a dangerous place for you.

There is nothing more lonely than an action taken quietly on your own, and nothing more comforting than doing that same quiet action in parallel with fellow humans doing the same action, everyone alone next to each other.

Remember: if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

She was angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear.

Diane felt a gentle hand touch her own, a sympathetic pat. Dawn had both hands on her coffee cup. Diane looked back down at her own hand, and saw the final quick motion of a gray-gloved hand disappearing under her table.

We are skipping friday this week, but we’ll make up for it by having double friday next week. Mark your schedules.

Dammit!” she said, stabbing the paper with her butter knife and then repeated “dammit” a couple of more times in a hopeless decrescendo.
“king city,” said the paper.
“yeah, yeah, so i’ve heard,” she muttered. No one around her noticed. Teenagers shout things a lot while smashing knives near their hands, everyone knew.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the max hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.

In terms of tacos, she was doing fine.

The present tense of regret is indecision.

Desperation does not breed empathy or clear thinking.

Sometimes it is easy to forget which things in the world can feel pain and which cannot.

Mostly we don’t get destroyed,” john said. “mostly we destroy ourselves.

Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect- no, even better- he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this is imperfect. And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our outsized love can seep and pool.

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.

Fine!” she shouted at it.
“okay!” shouted a man in a nearby booth at a stain on his tie.
in the kitchen, another man, in a floral apron and a hairnet, nodded at a tub of soaking dishes “yep,” he said.
people often found themselves assenting to inanimate objects in the moonlight all-nite.

Comfort was the answer to all life’s problems. It didn’t solve them, but it made them more distant for a bit as they quietly worsened.

Librarians are hideous creatures of unimaginable power. And even if you could imagine their power, it would be illegal. It is absolutely illegal to even try to picture what such a being would be like.

Fear is a reasonable response to life.

And if you’re ever feeling lonely just look at the moon.
someone, somewhere, is looking right at it too.

Jackie chose an overstuffed easy chair with a paisley design.
“wow,” she said, settling back and back into fabric that continued to give. For a moment the pain vanished. Comfort was the answer to all of life’s problems. It didn’t solve them, but it made them more distant for a bit as they quietly worsened.

But babies become children, and they go to elementary schools that indoctrinate them on how to overthrow governments, and they get interested in boys and girls, or they don’t, and anyway they change.

She didn’t have a good reason for most of what she did. Mostly, she went by what seemed right in the moment, and justified it to herself later, and in this way she was no different than anyone else she knew.

In other news, a recent report suggests that things may not be as they seem.

And night falls on you too. You have survived, survived everything up to this moment. Grip tight, hum, laugh, cry. Forget nothing and think many things of it.
goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight.

She left the shower as most people leave showers, clean and a little lonely.

Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us? we can cope with that. We can do this together. You and i, drowsily, but comfortably.

On sunday, a lambent crevice opened up in the street outside my house,
by tuesday birds were flying into it.
“i probably won’t miss you,” my mother said,
“i’m only interested in the end of the world,” I replied.

many find it difficult to breath
without the atmosphere
but we knew how. We just stopped breathing.

we’re at the moonlite all-nite dinner and they’re serving up fruit from the plants growing out of the waitress.
the closed sign whispers, “please, don’t touch me.”
we watch bodies fall to the ground outside like deep-sea creatures surfacing.

you turn to me and ask, “do you ever think about suicide?”
i look away from you and close my eyes,
eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth.

now you’re in the only car in the parking lot at midnight and you’re watching me throw stones at the moon,
which hangs low in the sky so he can look into your house.
your sister tried to touch him from her bedroom window once, and he flinched; now he and the oceans watch her with a quiet concern.
the lilac sky is trying to rest her head on his shoulder, all trees gradually growing through her.

a hummingbird whispers to you, “be careful, under her dress is her skin,” and then builds his nest in the middle of the highway,
i look back at you, and you close your eyes.

It’s nice to have a station pet. Wish it wasn’t trapped in a hovering prison in the men’s bathroom, but listen: no pet is perfect. It becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is.

She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.

It’s not other people that hurt us, but what we feel about them.

[mayor dana] I don’t know a lot of things. I do know there will always be problems for night vale. There are so many. Usually they pass. Often they kill many people, but what are people but deaths that haven’t happened yet?

[jackie] births that already happened?.

Where do we start?” said jackie.
josie told her. Jackie swore at her, and then apologized for swearing.
“the library, though.” jackie considered. “no. That’s. That’s.” she indicated with her hands what it was.
“the search for truth takes us to dangerous places,” said old woman josie. “often it takes us to that most dangerous place: the library. You know who said that? no? george washington did. Minutes before librarians ate him.

There’s no sense in going through life presuming awful things about people you do not know.

You may not live through it. And if you do, the you that lived through it will not be the same you that lived before it. In that sense, you will definitely not exist after, and i’m sorry.

The moon’s weird though, right? it’s there, and there, and then suddenly it’s not. And it seems to be pretty far up. Is it watching us? if not, what is it watching instead? is there something more interesting than us? hey, watch us moon! we may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try.

No one cared about a woman staring through binoculars from a parked car. It was a common sight. There were three other cars with binoculared, watching women just on that block, and that was light by night vale standards.

Science was meant to be hard. After all, what was science but a bunch of bored human beings trying to challenge themselves when faith became too easy.

We have nothing to speak about. There never was. Words are an unnecessary trouble. Expression is time wasting away. Any communication is just a yelp in the darkness. I am speaking now but I am saying nothing. I am just making noises, and, as it happens, they are organized in words and you should not draw meaning from this.

Last night, at a press conference, the city council reminded everyone that the dog park is there for our community enjoyment and use, and so it is important that no one enter, look at, or think about the dog park. They are adding a new advanced camera system to keep an eye on the great black walls of the dog park at all times, and if anyone is caught trying to enter it, they will be forced to enter it, and will never be heard from again. If you see hooded figures in the dog park, no you didn’t. The hooded figures are perfectly safe, and should not be approached at any costs. The city council ended the conference by devouring a raw potato in quick, small bites of their sharp teeth and rough tongues. No follow-up questions were asked, although there were a few follow-up screams.
we have also received word via encrypted radio pulses about the opening of a new store: lenny’s bargain house of gardenwares and machine parts, which until recently was that abandoned warehouse the government was using for the highly classified and completely secret tests I was telling you about last week. Lenny’s will serve as a helpful new source for all needs involving landscaping and lawn-decorating materials and also as a way for the government to unload all the machines and failed tests and dangerous substances that otherwise would be wasted on things like “safe disposal” or “burying in a concrete tomb until the sun goes out.”
get out to lenny’s for their big grand opening sale. Find eight government secrets and get a free kidnapping and personality reassignment so that you’ll forget you found them!.

We live in a pattern that we’ll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.

People are beautiful when they do beautiful things.

People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.

The search for truth takes us to dangerous places,” said old woman josie. “often it takes us to that most dangerous place: the library. You know who said that? no? george washington did. Minutes before librarians ate him.

She was not shy, but maybe lazy socially. Not willing to seek out situations and connections that were not already part of her routine.

Such are the foolish dreams of idealistic children who believe that anything can possibly get better over time.

The night vale pta released a statement today saying that if the school board could not promise to prevent children from learning about dangerous activities like drug use and library science during recess periods, they would be blocking all school entrances with their bodies. They pulled hundreds of bodies out from trucks, saying, “we own all of these bodies and we will not hesitate to use them to create great flesh barricades if that is what it takes to prevent our children from learning.

Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights, mostly void, partially stars, that sky reminds us: we don’t understand even more.

Are we living a life that is safe from harm?

of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is are we living a life that is worth the harm?.

And now a brief public service announcement. Alligators: can they kill your children? yes.

The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present.

To be remembered is, I think, a basic human right. Not one that occurs to a person when it is there, but like a parched throat in a desert when it is gone.

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they’re happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there’s a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case.

You say your life is unraveling. Your life cannot unravel. Your life is your life. You haven’t lost it. It’s just different now.