“So, still nineteen?” Noelle Connolly had said, when they spoke on the phone for the final time. Her disapproval was clear in her voice. “Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?”

They had been friends since sophomore Spanish class, but Noelle had been fifty-eight at the point she had finally asked Jackie that question, and spoke in tones that felt sickeningly parental to Jackie. Jackie had said so, and Noelle had become openly condescending, and they had both hung up, and she and Noelle had never spoken again. People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.

The radio came on by itself as she stood there, paper in hand. It always did at this time of night. Cecil Palmer, the host of Night Vale Community Radio, spoke to her. News, the community calendar, traffic.

She listened when she could to Cecil. Most of the town did. At home, Jackie had a small radio, only about two feet wide, a foot and a half tall. It was the lightweight portable edition (“under 14 lbs.!”) with a mother-of-pearl handle and sharply angled, open-beaked eagles carved into the upper corners.

Her mother had gotten it for her whenever her sixteenth birthday was, however long ago that had been, and it was one of Jackie’s favorite possessions, along with her record collection, which she never listened to because she didn’t have a license to own a record player yet.

Cecil Palmer spoke of the horrors of everyday life. Nearly every broadcast told a story of impending doom or death, or worse: a long life lived in fruitless fear of doom or death. It wasn’t that Jackie wanted to know all of the bad news of the world. It was that she loved sitting in the dark of her bedroom, swaddled in blankets and invisible radio waves.

Look, life is stressful. This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life. Births, deaths, comings, goings, the gulf of subjectivity and bravado between us and everyone we care about. All is sorrow, as a man once said without really doing much about it.

But when Cecil talked it was possible to let some of that go. To let go of the worries. To let go of the questions. To let go of letting or going.