276 - The Big Game

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.

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

It's Halloween and you've just settled in for a night of scary movies and candy dispersal.

You've got your porch light on, there's a giant foam spider in your window, a light-up skeleton on your lawn, and a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

You don't know about her, not yet.

So the doorbell rings.

Trick-or-treat, comes the cry, and as you open the door, you see a bunch of kids, and right at the front, a giant sea monster, its eyes as big as Pilates balls, and tentacles as thick as a mid-sized SUV.

Wow, you say, what an elaborate costume.

Are you a shark?

Are you a polar bear?

What are you?

And you ask this sincerely because you've never seen an animal before.

That's a kraken, says some other kid, dressed as a green witch.

Neat, you say, as you give all the kids their candy, but then the kraken grabs you with its many thick limbs.

It lifts you up and hands you a bottle of kraken black spiced rum.

Treat, it says reassuringly.

But you already knew it was a treat.

Kraken rum is bold, smooth, and made with a blend of spices.

It's an ideal spirit for your Halloween cocktails tonight.

Thanks, Kraken, you say.

Is that like a bird of some kind?

You really should learn your animals, you know.

Visit the official sponsor of Welcome to Nightville Kraken Rum.com to release the Kraken this Halloween.

Copyright 2025 Kraken Rum Company Kraken Rum dot com must be 21 or older.

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

By the time I hit my 50s, I'd learned a few things.

Like how family is precious.

Work can always wait.

And 99% of people over 50 already have the virus that causes shingles.

Not everyone at risk will develop it, but I did.

The painful, blistering rash disrupted my life for weeks.

Don't learn about your shingles risk the hard way.

Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today.

Sponsored by GSK.

Hey, it's Jeffrey Kraner, and I'm on the road with welcome to Nightville for the next couple of weeks.

Come see our live show, Murder Night in Blood Forest, starring Cecil Baldwin, Symphony Sanders, live music by Disparition, and musical guest, Aaron McCeown.

Murder Night in Blood Forest is hilarious and twisted and so much fun.

And you don't even need to be caught up on this podcast to have a great time.

So bring a date or an aunt or a stranger or that faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

We'll be in Austin, Texas on October 22nd, in Dallas on the 23rd, Oklahoma City on the 24th, October 25th, we're in Lawrence, Kansas, St.

Louis on the 27th of October, Indianapolis on the 28th, Toronto, we'll see you on the 30th, and Halloween night, we're in Detroit, Michigan.

Tickets and future dates at welcometonightville.com slash live.

Also, if you're ramping up for holiday gift buying or you just want cool stuff for yourself, we've got great new things in our store: a spooky holiday sweater, new bumper stickers that say, keep honking, I'm listening to my weird little podcast, Night Vale scarves and beanies, backpacks, challenge coins, bandanas, and as always, shorts that say creepy on the butt.

So get your Night Vale swag and we'll see you on the road this month.

And hey, thanks.

I hope this cursed video cassette finds you well.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Elliot 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.

Elliot 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, Elliot guesses, are maple trees.

Maybe it's not a maple leaf, though it looks a lot like the one on the Canadian flag.

Elliot loves flags.

He knows all the flags of 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, Elliot 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 Lufnarp, the dragon is very small.

And it's wearing a business suit to celebrate Lufnarp's deep and abiding love of making deals.

Elliot 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.

Elliot still remembers that they ate cake and watched an old western, Bad Day at Black Rock.

Elliot 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.

Elliot's grandpa had seen the movie a dozen times before.

Instead of watching the movie himself, Elliot 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 Elliot's mind, that sentence makes perfect sense.

18, someone shouts in the distance.

Elliot 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?

18.

comes the shout again, and Elliot 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 Elliot.

Elliot 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 the ball fly through the air.

They all stare at it until their shoulders slump.

They pat Elliot on the rump and say supportive things, but without cussing.

The crowd claps politely.

Elliot 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 Elliot does.

Closure is a you problem, his older sister, Ava, might have said if she cared about things like closure.

She mostly cared about oversized hoodies and video games.

He doesn't like Ava.

Not at all.

She goes to the same school as Elliot, but has different friends.

Elliot 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 Elliot 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 Elliot.

But shortly after that, Mr.

Yu said that, well,

some forms of time travel are possible, just not like in the movies.

And Elliot raised his hand and everyone looked shocked, because Elliot never raised his hand.

Mr.

Yu smiled and said, Elliot, you have a question?

And Elliot 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.

Elliot had stopped listening to Mr.

Yu because it was boring to think that stars are a kind of old movie.

Bad Day a Black Rock?

Great title.

Dumb picture.

The cosmos?

What's in a name?

Nothing, apparently.

Elliot 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.

But before you do that, you have to know when and where you want to go.

Elliot wants to go back to when he was eight years old, and his mom took him and Ava and Henry to these underground caves.

It was dark and damp in those caves, and Elliot almost panicked because he was scared of dark and small places.

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 Ava lived with mom.

He liked Henry far more than he liked Ava, 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 Elliot 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 Elliot 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 Elliot's mom.

The moon is actually a bad name for that thing, Elliot 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 Elliot much better than Mr.

Yu.

Elliot 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 Ava live with Dad.

That way he and Henry could live with her.

He worries about Henry.

Henry is different since mom and Ava left.

Henry reminded Elliot of the moon because he was constantly moving around, but in a really predictable way.

These days, Henry reminds Elliot of a scorpion, which is the word on the front of Elliot'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.

18.

Coach Jimenez shouts, and Elliot stands up.

He looks 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 five?

Really give himself a long deadline?

No.

He needs to put a clock on it.

That's not exactly the way Elliot 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.

Elliot 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 Elliot is ready to kick the extra point and Elliot taps his own hip twice.

He stares at the hole he made and wonders if there are caves below Night Vale.

He does this 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.

Two years

to the day I was driving to Queens to try to get late.

My brain is bad,

my body's worse.

It's gonna roll me out of New York in a shiny black hearse.

You found a penny

from 93 right there in Baltimore.

Traffic made you think about me.

You'd risk it all

to pick it up.

You said you'd done stupid things for just a bit of good.

I wasn't afraid

of a cyclone

that day.

I was only afraid

you'd hear me screaming

your name.

I was never

the same.

Brushing my teeth at the planet fit.

I wish I never asked if you were double joining.

I watch the spit,

I wash my hair.

I wanna text you, but it's desperate.

I pretend I don't care.

You drove too fast

through Silver Lake.

You said I'm gonna take you out,

but I swear it's not a day.

You locked the steering wheel up to my wrist.

Here's a bunch of keys, you gotta see which one fits.

I wasn't afraid

of the cyclone that day.

I was only afraid

you'd hear me screaming.

And I won't be ashamed.

Cause to death I saw your face.

And I wanna replace

all my glass with paper plates.

Things that cannot break.

You chose to hit play on this podcast today.

Smart Choice.

Progressive loves to help people make smart choices.

That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies.

So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you.

Give it a try after this episode at progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

Not available in all states or situations.

Prices vary based on how you buy.

If you've shopped online, it's extremely likely that you've bought from a business powered by Shopify.

You know that purple shop pay button you see at checkout?

The one that makes the process from, I think I'm ready to buy, to I can't wait till it gets here, so incredibly easy?

That's Shopify.

And there's a reason so many businesses sell with it, because Shopify makes it easy to start and run your business.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e-commerce in the US.

From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started.

It gives you a leg up from the very beginning with hundreds of beautiful ready-to-go templates to express your brand style so you don't have to spend time coding a website.

Shopify allows you to tackle all the important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more.

Plus they have built-in marketing and email tools to help find and keep new customers so you can easily spread your brand's word.

And did I mention that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world?

It's the reason why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet.

Your customers already know it, love it, and actually use it.

If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/slash realm.

Go to shopify.com/slash realm.

Shopify.com/slash realm.

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 Elliot 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 space-time.

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, Elliot could look it up and be done with it.

But Coach Jimenez doesn't like Elliot.

because he doesn't like any of his players.

Coach seems to love his players though, and that makes sense to Elliot.

You can love someone, but not like them.

Elliot loves Ava, 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 Elliot doesn't really talk much.

Grandpa liked to talk, like Ava.

Elliot 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?

Elliot 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 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, Elliot realizes.

He wants to know about the reality of existence, or he wants to know about watercrafts.

It's confusing to mix the two.

18.

Someone shouts along with some supportive and loving cusses.

Elliot 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.

Elliot'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 establish why, when, or how Henry got arrested, Elliot 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.

18.

Elliot hears his number this time and he runs onto the field.

The crowd is unusually quiet.

His teammates look scared.

Elliot 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 Elliot and says, Fonseca, we got your back.

Make us proud.

I'm paraphrasing because the coach also crammed in two F-words and somehow the S-word into those two sentences.

Elliot 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.

Elliot 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 Elliot and the players around him to show the world who they are.

We are

what we are, Elliot 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.

Elliot stands seven 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.

Elliot 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 Elliot.

More people tackle him.

They scream loudly in his ear.

They're saying, you did it.

but with very loving and supportive curse words adding to their phrasing.

Someone shouts, District Champs.

They lift Elliot onto their shoulders and carry him away.

Elliot 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.

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

It is written by Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Kraner, and Bree Williams.

Sound design and production by Disparition.

The voice of Nightvale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Disparition.

All of it can be found at Disparition.net.

This episode's weather was The Cyclone by Al Olander.

Find out more at the link in our show notes.

Comments, questions, email us at info at welcometonightvale.com or follow us on Blue Sky at Nightvale Radio or on Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok at Nightvale Official.

Or accidentally give real pain to your real friends and sham pain to your sham friends.

But mainly, check out welcome to nightvale.com, where we have a twice-monthly mailing list that is the best way to keep up to date directly from us to you.

The media and internet are being eaten by billionaires.

The only way we survive is by communicating directly to each other.

Today's proverb, don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

It's after Labor Day.

That's so gauche.

Hey y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.

And did you know that Welcome to Night Vale is back out on tour?

We are.

We're going to be up in the northeast, in the Boston, New York City area, going all the way over to the upper Midwest in Minnesota.

That's in July.

You'll kind of draw a line through there and you'll kind of see the towns we'll be hitting.

We'll also be doing Philly down to Florida in September.

And we'll be going from Austin all the way up through the middle of the country into Toronto, Canada in October, and then we'll be doing the West Coast plus the Southwest plus Colorado in January of 2026.

You can find all of the show dates at welcometonightvale.com slash live.

Listen, this brand new live show is so much fun.

It is called Murder Night in Blood Forest, and it stars Cecil Baldwin, of course, Symphony Sanders, me, and live original music.

by Disparition and who knows what other special guests may come along for the ride.

These tours are always so much much fun, and they are for you, the diehard fan, and you, the night veil new kid alike.

So feel comfortable bringing your family, your partner, your co-workers, your cat, whatever.

They don't got to know what a night veil is to like the show.

Tickets to all of these live shows are on sale now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

Don't let time slip away and miss us when we are in your town because otherwise we will all be sad.

Get your tickets to our live U.S.

plus Toronto tours right now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

And hey, see you soon.