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(transcript) Episode 102: "Love is a Shambling Thing"
🕑 Added 2020-06-02 21:00:51 +0000 UTC Look at it from the raindrop's point of view. Welcome to Night ValeYesterday, of course, was Valentine’s Day, our first in four years. After that last Valentine’s Day, which destroyed much of Night Vale and left many innocent victims buried under piles of rubble and candy hearts, the city government built a large concrete dome over the Hallmark Store in the mini-mall downtown, thus keeping its dangerous sentiment from leaking into the outside world. Four employees of the store were unfortunately sealed inside, but there was just no time to remove them during the seven month construction of the dome. It would have thrown everything off schedule.
However, City Council has a renewed interest in love since starting their on-again/off-again romance with the Station Management here at Night Vale Community Radio. (Currently their status is on, although they fight a lot, and their fights have caused considerable structural damage to the Arby’s and displaced a number of town citizens through time.) So the Council wanted to create a controlled, safe Valentine’s celebration, in order to impress Station Management, despite strong protests from Night Vale citizens who do not believe there is any way to safely handle Valentine’s materials.
City Council announced yesterday that Valentines was a celebration of love, and deemed that the official slogan of the day was “Love is.”
More on that in a moment, but first, some…listeners, I am sorry to have to report what I next have to report.
Old Woman Josie, your friend and mine, but more my friend than yours. Beyond Carlos, she is who I am closest with in this strange and friendly town of ours. And she is…she is under hospice care at her home. There is no upside to this story, other than on the broadest, most distant view of time. This is not a surprise, but even with a long time to prepare for the worst, we still are in shock, as though we stepped out onto a sunny street and found ourselves falling into a lake just on the liquid side of frozen.
And that is maybe the best way of describing it. I feel cold, barely able to act. My words feel slow, my hands tremble.
Only Josie seems not upset about her own condition. She lies on her bed, surrounded by the beings who describe themselves as angels and the woman, Alondra, who describes herself as Josie’s daughter. Josie smiled and said, “What a joy that I have gotten to live so long, what a relief that I don’t have to live forever.”
Anyone wanting to visit Josie and say their goodbyes, please dig a hole in your backyard or any public garden, whisper your wishes for Josie into it, and the angels will hear you. I know it’s illegal to acknowledge the existence of angels, but right now I don’t care. Please understand that Josie has limited strength and even more limited time, and she may not be able to see you all.
I….I of course will keep you updated. But the trajectory is certain. Only the timeline isn’t known. I suppose the same is true for every person, but we are always surprised at the literal truth of it, every time, over and over.
And now, listeners, the classifieds section.
LOST: Moths (all of them). Reward if found. Contact us by dialing numbers into your phone at random. If you were meant to reach us, you will.
Notice! That veiled woman who sits, motionless, in the shadows of unlit parks at 3am gives really great relationship advice. Bring raw meat, and never look directly at her.
The schedule of events at the public library is up. It's just your name listed as an event once an hour, with the word CANCELED next to each.
Found: Something that you will never notice is gone, and that we will never return. You don’t even remember having it, but you did have it, once. Not anymore.
The Night Vale Psychic and Medium Society would like to let you know the answer to all your future questions. These answers, in order: the porch light, eight, because we could, a distant star, green, also green, we're sorry but we have to. If you have any follow-up questions, then we won’t have done our job correctly.
This has been the classifieds.
The City Council made careful preparations for a day of love. They put up streamers around City Hall, and reserved a table at Tourniquet for a fancy dinner date with Station Management. The rest of us also made preparations for Valentines by stocking up on bottled water and canned goods, and discussing with loved ones where we would meet if we needed to evacuate. Several volunteer firefighters kept a brave watch for candy hearts or teddy bears with anatomically-correct, glistening hearts stitched onto their bellies.
The City Council revised their earlier slogan saying they had misspoke. Their slogan was not “Love is.” but “Love is a shambling thing.” They nodded vehemently with whatever head-like protrusion the multi-body entity uses to nod, and repeated “Love is a shambling thing” in a whisper before dissipating into the air like evaporating liquid.
Apparent leader of the five-headed dragons, Hadassah McDaniels, has responded to the fatal shooting of one of her brother’s five heads with an understandable mix of grief and rage and fire breath. She has staged a several week long protest outside of city hall in which she peacefully held up signs, and peacefully ate, mauled, or burned anyone attempting to enter or exit the building.
There has still been no sighting or word of Hiram since the shooting. We reached out to the five headed dragons to see if they had any updates on that front, but they took our microphone from us and devoured it in a quick twirling series of bites like it was a cob of corn. I did not get any follow-up to that, since I fled screaming before they could put me through the same treatment, but I will take this response as a sign that they also do not have news about Hiram.
Haddassah has said that she seeks justice. Specifically the justice she seeks is pain inflicted upon Night Vale equal to or greater than the pain inflicted upon her own soul. She said “You don’t understand the true nature of your splintered world. There are terrible forces surrounding you, held together in a fragile truce. That truce will end, and with it your town.”
Then she saw Jeremy Godfrey emerge from City Hall, there to pay a small municipal fine for wearing unfashionable sweaters, and she set his hair on fire.
And now a word from our sponsors.
Today’s show has been brought to you by Sears. Sears would like you to know that they offer quality products at low prices, and also that there was a miscommunication and they thought this was a television station. They prepared a TV ad, and aren’t sure what to do now. I guess we’ll just describe what you would have seen had you seen this commercial on TV. This is not the level of quality we want you to think of when you think of Sears, but here goes.
Exterior. A house. Snow drifts down onto a yard already piled with snow. A warm glow on the snow, reflected light. We pan up. It is the light from the house’s windows. So cozy. So warm. Why would anyone ever want to leave and go to Sears? What kind of commercial is this? Stick with us.
Interior, living room. A woman looks out the window, bites her lip. Bad weather, she thinks. I’m not going to go outside. We don’t hear this as narration, the performer expresses this with her face. She’s a great actor. Wish you could have seen her. She doesn’t even talk in this commercial. All visual performance. What a waste.
So, bad weather, she doesn’t want to go outside. She goes to the computer, loads up Amazon. It’s not Amazon, because we don’t want to advertise another company, but it’s like, clearly Amazon, you know? We see her clicking on stuff, stuff she could be buying at Sears but is instead buying on Amazon.
Flash forward a day. She got next day shipping, I guess. Same house exterior. It’s still snowy. The snow is high, the pavement is icy. A mail truck pulls up. A mail carrier gets out. He has her package. We see her in the window, so happy about her decision to buy from Amazon. He starts up the drive to her. He slips on the ice. Her package goes flying. It says fragile on the package, so that’s probably ruined. He falls badly, fractures his leg in three places. We don’t know this just by looking at it, but the filming of the stunt didn’t go like it was supposed to, so I can tell you: fractured in three places. Horror on her face. She does a great job acting this scene. I really wish you could have seen it.
We’re now in a courtroom. She’s being sued. The jury looks stern. She’s going to lose. All of her savings will go to the mail carrier. But he isn’t happy either. He is in incredible daily pain, and what is money going to do to fix that? No one is happy. We fade out on the two of them, at their separate tables in court, both facing a future that is diminished, that is diminishing.
Next time get in your car and go to Sears.
This has been a message from your sponsor.
Back to our Valentines report. How was it? Honestly, uneventful. Casualties were limited to a few neighborhoods, and only two out of three gas mains exploded. Most of the town isn’t completely burning, only a little scorched. As far as Valentines goes, it was a huge success.
The date between City Council and Station Management also went well, as far as we can tell. Tourniquet’s entire building was enveloped in a thick fog that pulsed a strange blue, and there was the reverberant harmony of a children’s choir. When the fog lifted, every human customer in the restaurant had vanished and were replaced by figures shrouded in white cloth, slowly twirling in place. City Council and Station Management were intertwining their torso appendages and cooing.
It does seem I got the slogan for yesterday wrong again. It was actually “Love is a shambling thing. Gray faced and gasping.” Huh. Pretty good branding. Very romantic.
What was that? I’m being told that that’s still wrong. Hold on, let me figure this out. In the meantime, let’s get to that weather.
[WEATHER]
“Love is a shambling thing. Gray faced and gasping. It moves in from the West, the setting sun behind it. Those who see it avert their eyes.
“Love stumbles and shudders, love grasps but is not grasped. It sees a man and the man does not look away. Love reaches out a gray hand. The man touches the hand, just lightly, just on the palm, and the man feels heat inside of him. His heart is on fire. This is not a metaphor. His heart is on fire, and so, soon, is his skin, his hair. His teeth become more and more visible as his face shrinks and melts away. Love watches dispassionately. Love does not love what it does, love only does it. Love does not have eyes, and neither, now, does the man.
“Love is a shambling thing. It climbs through a window into an infant’s bedroom. When one of the mothers comes in to check on her baby son, there is love too in the crib, curled up beside him. Love murmurs, and the baby spits restlessly. The baby does not burn. The baby will eventually burn, but by then he will not be a baby. The woman looks down at the ghastly form of love, curled beside her son, and she thinks ‘what have I done?’ She cries, not because she is happy or sad, but because that is what her body needs to do next. Love rises from the crib, and passes her without a glance. Love is a shambling thing. It shambles out of her home.
“Love, with skin that peels and pops, and joints that moan and snap, climbs to the top of a tall building and surveys its surroundings. So many people. It opens its mouth. Its teeth are the only part of its body that look new and healthy. It has so many teeth. It yelps and howls, an inarticulate sermon of lust and loss, and everyone hears it. They hear it as a shudder in their stomach and hitch in their step. Love does not eat or drink. Love separates its many teeth and consumes.
“Love is a shambling thing. Gray faced and gasping. It moves out to the east, the night drawing closed behind it. Those who see it avert their eyes.
So that’s the final version of the City Council’s slogan for Valentine’s Day. It’s, um, it’s catchy. They also sent over their current draft for a Night Vale Valentines Day logo design. It’s not really a logo, per se. It’s an actual, physical rusty bear trap hidden, in a set position, below a pile of loose tissue paper in an undisclosed truck stop restroom. I like it. Again, great branding. It’s very eye-catching, depending on how you look at it.
We seem to have all made it through this Valentine’s Day. Except those of us who didn’t. But any given day there are those of us who do not make it. Every day is a new opportunity for danger. Every day is another day survived. Every survival, another chance for love.
From one who loves to all of you out there who love, good night, Night Vale. Good night.
Comments
Ash W
My favorite part is when City Council and Station management see each other across the skating rink. Old School Love. <3
