202 - The Day After the Day

and I don't just write Welcome to Nightville, we also write books that are not about Nightville, and here are some of them.

Alice Isn't Dead, a lesbian road trip horror love story for fans of Stephen King.

The Halloween Moon, my book for kids of any age about a Halloween where things really start to get weird for everyone.

The First 10 Years, a memoir from me and my wife about our relationship told year by year without consulting each other about our differences in memory.

And from Jeffrey, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, an apocalyptic novel that takes place in the same universe as the Within the Wires podcast.

No matter what you're looking for, we've written a book just for you.

Find them where you find books.

Okay, bye!

Summer is turning to fall, which frankly, rude of summer to do, but don't worry.

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I got an adorable dress for my daughter, which she helped pick out.

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Experience what it must be like to be wealthy without having to, you know, have a bank account that doesn't make you wince when you check it.

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That's quince.com slash nightfail.

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Let's have a heart-to-heart.

It'll be quick.

I don't think I'm supposed to have it outside my body for too long.

Welcome to Nightfail.

We tried to prevent it.

We tried to avoid it.

We tried to deny it, to pretend that if we did nothing, maybe it would pass us by.

But unfortunately, for the first time in five years, Valentine's Day has happened again.

I know that all of us survivors must be rattled, barely hanging on, gaping up at the sun and disbelieving the light, but know that you are not alone.

We are all survivors, and Valentine's Day is behind us.

What choice have we but to try to put our world back together to move on from here?

What choice have we but the continuance of time, time which is simultaneously merciful and without mercy, driving the bad toward us, but also sweeping it safely away into the past?

Valentine's Day is over.

Now the recovery begins.

But first, the news.

The sun has risen.

Now this might not seem like news to you.

Oh, it does that every day, you tell me.

It will do it tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, you pedantically lecture.

But think about what a miracle that is.

That this cosmic object without which there is no life, without which there is merely barren rock floating in a great nothing, that the sun returns to us day after day like a dependable mother coming home from work.

In the journalism business, there is a lot of focus on the negative and the rare.

Take, for instance, airplanes.

We report on even the most minor of mishaps that occur in commercial flight, but do not report on the thousands of successful takeoffs and landings every day.

The common success is not news.

The vanishingly rare failure is.

As a result, you might get the impression that flying is not safe, but that's an incomplete picture.

The truth is that everything is not safe.

Flying is just part of everything.

Same with the sun.

We don't report on its successful rising and setting, and so you think it common, or often don't think of it at all.

Ah, but here you are, a journalist.

reporting on something common and positive, you say, really testing the limits of my patience.

Because you have not let me finish.

The sun has risen today,

but it will not tomorrow.

You think a plane crash is bad?

Just wait.

This has been the local news.

In international news,

wars.

Probably.

I mean, usually, right?

Also, trade.

Trade is very important because that is how numbers go up.

And if numbers not go up,

then you got wars.

There are also trees, of course, internationally and nationally, but less of them than before.

We like trees.

This is not for the trees' sake, it's because it turns out we need trees and so we like them.

before

uh

you know we can sort of take or leave

Internationally speaking, thinking on a global level now, like really big, there is politics.

Politics is the art of the possible.

I'm sorry.

I misread.

Politics is the art of explaining why nothing is possible, even though almost everything is.

Seems like a real messed up slogan to me, but what do I know?

I'm not a politician.

The important thing is to think globally, but act locally.

So think about, for instance, Antarctica.

Cold, right?

But act locally.

Locally, it's pretty warm.

It's hot, even.

It's a desert.

So go for a swim in your friend Lapita's pool while thinking about Antarctica, and that's how we'll really make a change.

This has been International News.

From my window, I see only

destruction.

Oh, and Leanne Hart, who is waving at me and mouthing a big hi.

Hi, Leanne.

I like your hatchet today.

Yeah, it matches your shoes.

It's very cute.

But other than Leanne,

I see only destruction.

A teetering.

A crumbling.

The hollow remnant of, the last remaining brick of, the empty field where once there was.

This destruction exists in our hearts as well.

Every loss in the physical world is reflected ten times in the memory of everyone who bore witness to Valentine's Day.

And there has been so much loss.

We are each of us a hall of mirrors, exponentializing every little hurt until it overwhelms.

Today is the day after

the day.

The Hallmark store is an absolute wreck.

The Hallmark elves are trying to sweep it all up, but they look exhausted.

And some of them mangled by what happened.

More soon.

But now, traffic.

Once there was a town.

It doesn't matter which town, except to those who lived there, for whom it mattered quite a lot.

The town had roads and houses and three schools and two Wendy's.

The two Wendy's were both on the same side of town.

No one knew why.

The point is that this town wasn't a special town, it was just a town, which is to say a bunch of people, most of whom didn't know each other, living in a space that had been defined by people who had long since died.

And yet, the people in this town, they felt something about their town.

It wasn't pride, exactly, but it wasn't an absence of pride either.

More like a sense of belonging.

The town was them, and they were the town.

And it was arbitrary, but it was theirs.

And so it mattered to them, because in the grand scale, not much belonged to them.

A bit of grass or gravel, a few walls, a sink or two.

And the idea of this town, so they felt protective of what they had.

Eventually, the town ended.

All towns eventually will.

It was not dramatic when it ended.

No one even had to move.

The town was swallowed by a larger city.

Now it was just one neighborhood in a city with 18 schools and five Wendys, although the Wendys were still very close together and no one knew why.

The children who lived in that town felt some loss at the change, but their children didn't.

And their children's children had no idea that the town had existed.

For them, they belonged to the city, and the city belonged to them.

It was arbitrary, but it was theirs, and so it mattered to them.

This has been

traffic.

And now, our daily audio puzzle.

As usual, you have six attempts to guess a five-letter word.

I'll tell you what letters aren't in it.

There is no B, V, D, A, E, I, F, C, Ellipses, or Umlauts.

To the disappointment of your insufferable writer, friends, there is no M dash.

None of the winged characters are there, nor any of the ancient Nordic runes.

There is the Egyptian hieroglyph that's a detailed portrait of a pint-tailed duck.

It is in position 5, so think about words that end with a little duck picture.

There is no O.

There is a U, but it's not in the word, it's just nearby.

The sixth letter is Y, but it is both silent and invisible.

As a hint, the meaning of the word is grandly but foolishly, as in the style of a 16th century jester.

Okay,

you have six guesses.

Good luck.

This has been your daily audio puzzle.

The city council has declared a state of emergency from a beach resort in Bermuda, which is where it says they should go in the Night Vale emergency plans.

See, they shrieked, it's written right here, in the event of a catastrophe, the city council must immediately go to a really nice, like, at least four-star resort in Bermuda.

I pointed out that they were the ones who wrote those plans, but I was shouted down by their many voices.

The only council member that stayed was, of course, the intrepid Tamika Flynn.

who managed the blood donation program for the injured.

She did this by repeatedly stabbing vicious librarians with a harpoon while they tried to wrap their tendrils and toothy jaws around her, then collecting that blood and handing it out in little Ziploc bags marked, fresh blood, with a smiley face.

She really is so considerate.

Fortunately, it appears that Carlos and Esteban were totally safe from Valentine's.

Carlos is more of a St.

Patrick's Day guy, and Esteban is, you know, a four-year-old.

As for me, I did what every Nightbill citizen is taught to do in the event of Valentine's Day.

I ducked and covered, held on tight to the nearest table leg and screamed, oh no, oh help, oh please, over and over until it seemed like things had settled down.

And now a word from our sponsors.

Today's broadcast is brought to you.

It was given.

You did nothing to receive it, and yet, here it is.

Do you ever think about what was required for this broadcast to reach you?

Not just my hard work, nor the work of my producers, nor of station management, whatever it is they do inside the caverns they've dug beneath their office, nor of the interns who sacrifice time and

other things to the cause of your momentary diversion.

No, it is also the labor of the steelworkers who made the girders for our tower, the engineers and day workers who constructed it, the electricians who made it sing with radio waves.

All of these people brought this broadcast to you.

Do you feel grateful?

Do you often

feel

grateful?

Today's broadcast is brought

to you.

Think on that.

This has been a word from our sponsors.

Wreckage upon wreckage.

We walk through a street strewn with boxes of chocolates and red crepe and shattered buildings.

Asphalt buckled under the seismic expression of yearning hearts.

Each of us has been affected in our own way.

Jackie Fiero says that her pawn shop has been inundated with teddy bears, and she doesn't think she'll ever be able to sell enough of them to find the structure of her shop again.

It's buried under a good

four miles of them, she sighed, leaning back on the hood of her 2007 Ford F-150.

Sarah Sultan, president of the Knightvale Community College, who is a fist-sized River rock, says that she suffered severe injuries during the disaster and cannot heal

because she is a

fist-sized river rock and so

has no healing capabilities.

My niece Janice said that the Registry of Middle School crushes, which she keeps on her desk, no longer afraid of its secrets, but enjoying it as a memento of adventures past.

Anyway, she said that the registry burst into flames, and she only prevented my sister's house from burning as well by grabbing the registry with her bare hands and hurling it out the window.

In the process, her hands were burnt quite badly, and she is being attended to at Knightville Hospital.

They tell me she should make a full recovery soon.

Also, she accidentally threw the registry out of her window and right into her neighbor's window, burning down their house.

Ah,

well,

Pobody's nerf.

What are we to do?

The day after the day.

What else is there but to exist

and to observe the weather?

I went swimming to the middle of the sea

just to wash away the scars

Lay my armor down beneath the dark wood tree

And I slept beneath the stars And I flew into the sky Far away from our lives

Cause I knew that if I stayed you won't let me die

From your cherry lips, you wished me to be well

You told me stories of my soul

And when the demons came and dragged me down to hell You left me strung upon the pole

And I fell into the night

far away

from your life

let me die

I found a folding map of all the seven seas

Down amongst your traveling shoes

I found a photograph that brought me to my knees It used to be of me and you

So I sailed into the white

Far away and out of sight

Because I knew that if I stayed, you'd only let me die

So I went swimming to the middle of the sea With nothing left for me on land

I knew I'd never lay with you beneath the trees Or sleep upon the sand

So I'll fly into the night

Far away from our lives Because I know that if I stay, you'd only let me die.

Hey, it's Jeffrey Kraner with a word from our sponsor.

You're on a desert island, but not a deserted island.

Someone else is there.

Something else is there.

In the water surrounding you, lurks a mythical beast with two large eyes and many long arms.

You're just now hearing of this beast, but you're not afraid because you don't plan to swim.

Though that water looks nice, you're good at talking yourself into things, and soon you are in the sea, frolicking and splashing.

You even squeal, thinking you're all alone.

But you forgot what I just said.

You're not alone.

Something wraps itself around you.

It lifts you high in the air, waving you about at dizzying heights.

You look down and see the mythical kraken.

You start to scream, but in its other tentacles are bottles of kraken black spiced rum and kraken gold spiced rum.

I love kraken rum, you say.

It's bold, smooth, and made with a blend of spices.

You high-five the beast as it sets you back down on the island, along with the bottles of kraken rum.

It winks and tells you kraken rum is ideal for Halloween cocktails and disappears back into the dark, briny depths.

Visit the official sponsor of Welcome to Night Vale, Kraken Rum.com to release the Kraken this Halloween.

Copyright twenty twenty five Kraken Rum Company Kraken Rum dot com.

Like the deepest sea, the Kraken should be treated with great respect and responsibility.

When you look into the shadows, do you ever feel something looking back?

If you're looking for your next great fiction podcast, something dark, immersive, and just a little unsettling, listen to The Void, the new series from Fable and Folly.

It's made for fans of horror, sci-fi, and seriously spooky stories.

In the town of Milton, the darkness isn't just in your head, it's in the woods.

They call it the void, a cursed expanse that surrounds the town and swallows anyone who dares to leave.

But when a strange old man shares a mysterious pamphlet that promises a path through the void, Sam and his friends set off on a journey that unravels everything that they thought they knew about their home.

The void is dark, atmospheric, and relentlessly tense, with cinematic sound design, a full voice cast, and a haunting musical score.

Think stranger things meet Super 8, but in podcast form.

Search for the void wherever you get your podcasts and step carefully.

The woods are watching.

The day after Valentine's, we woke like it was any other day.

But it was not any other day.

The day after Valentine's, we looked hard at everything around us because it should have been different.

But it was not different.

We were different.

The day after Valentine's, I went to the Ralph's and bought four oranges and a box of cereal.

Just that.

Just four oranges, just a box of cereal.

And it felt the same, but it felt so different.

And I struggled to put into words my own experience.

There is a gulf shaped by trauma that is invisible even to the sufferer.

We do not see the crevasse, even as we fall into it.

The day after Valentine's, I ate a picnic in Grove Park with Carlos and Esteban.

and Dana Cardinal and Pamela Winchell.

Carlos ate little.

He said he wasn't wasn't hungry.

Dana ate her fill, but said it didn't taste like much.

Everything seems a little duller today, she said.

Not quite itself.

But everything was the same.

It was Dana that was different.

Pamela Winchell expounded for several minutes on the meaning of emergency.

It was a coping mechanism, and it comfort her.

Esteban rolled around in the grass and giggled.

Any lasting effects from Valentine's Day were buried in him and would only surface later as a tremble or a habit that he would not understand.

The day after Valentine's, we said, it's over.

But we did not believe it was over.

We believed it would never be over, that we would always be living the same sad and terrifying minute, breathing the same stale air, thick with our own fear.

But we are not in that moment anymore.

But we were,

and some part of us is, still.

The day after Valentine's was a rebuilding, a recovery,

a return to form, a back to business.

Bury the bodies and stand up the fences.

It's time to move on.

We relentlessly devour the past and regurgitate it as the future.

We are always caught in a moment that is no longer what was, but is not quite yet what will be.

We live our entire lives in between,

in between joys, in between tragedies, in between picnics with friends.

And so, the day after Valentine's, we did what we did any day.

We made do.

We moved on.

We continued to live until we couldn't anymore.

Stay tuned next for an old episode of Frasier.

It's the one where Frasier finds the doorway to the other Seattle in his bathroom mirror.

May it bring you some comfort.

And from the day after Valentine's to whatever day it is when you hear this.

Good night, Night Vale.

Good night.

Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents.

It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Kraner and produced by Disparition.

The voice of Night Vale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at disparition.bandcamp.com.

This episode's weather was I Went Swimming to the Middle of the Sea by Raising Kane.

Find out more at raising-kane.bandcamp.com.

Comments, questions, email us at info at welcometonightvale.com or follow us on Twitter at Nightvale Radio.

Or stay up until you see the sunrise and think, well, there that thing is again.

Check out Welcome to Night Vale for info about the Welcome to Night Vale novels.

There are three of them, telling stories you will never hear on the podcast.

Today's proverb, all dogs go to heaven.

Even dogs who have done a murder.

There are so many murder dogs in heaven.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre junk.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, From Greece to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look, and we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale's official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast.

Join me, Meg Bashwinner and fellow tri-hosts, Hal Lovelin and Symphony Sanders, as we dissect all of the cool, squishy, and slimy bits of every episode of Welcome to Nightvale.

Come for the insightful and hilarious commentary, and stay for all of the weird and wild behind-the-scenes stories.

Good morning, Nightvale, with new episodes every other Thursday.

Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Yes, even there.