“Guess so,” Jackie said.

Jackie looked at her car and Diane looked at the sidewalk, and they both almost walked away.

“Hey,” said Diane. “Do you want to look at this stuff together? Just see if there’s anything we can both learn from it?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Jackie, still looking at her car. “That’d be cool, I guess.”

Diane put her arm around Jackie’s shoulder to help her to the car, but her energy was almost gone in the panic of having nearly orphaned Josh, so Jackie put an arm around Diane. Limping, but moving, they carried one another away from the library.

29

The shoe box marked KING CITY had a book and a small stack of newspaper articles. The book was called Fun Facts and Anecdotes Related to King City and Environs. It was written by noted actor and civic historian Harrison Ford. It was cheaply made, and even a skim of its contents indicated a lack of careful copyediting and layout in its production.

Jackie flipped open to somewhere in the middle.

King City Fact #1061

Did you know? King City is the only city in California to have had a mayor right from its very founding. It has never gone a second without a mayor. It has always had one!

Again.

King City Fact #702

The fad of playing “Dark Side of the Moon” over “Wizard of Oz” was popularized by King City’s own George Taylor Morris.

Again.

King City Fact #986

We have the most oranges.

“What the hell?” she said, flipping faster through the useless book. “I almost died for this?”

King City Fact #3

No animals were harmed.

She tossed the useless book on the car floor and picked up the stack of newspaper articles.

KING CITY REPORTS SERIOUS TROUBLE WITH

CONCEPTS OF EXISTENCE, LOSS

JANUARY 23, 2003

BY LEANN HART

Senior Life and Style Reporter

A city in central California with no apparent connections to our town of Night Vale or the vast, flat desert in which we reside is reporting trouble with ideas like existence and loss. They are reporting that reality isn’t what it used to be, and that life seems somehow empty, or that it always was, and they just never noticed.

In a press release sent only to Night Vale for reasons we do not understand, King City indicated that it feels out of sync with cities only a few miles away and that perhaps everyone they know are just variations on the same, single person. Everyone is one person, says King City. There are a lot of that person.

Also, they need to elect a mayor. They haven’t had a mayor in so long. It’s time to elect a mayor, they said.