She knew college was a thing nineteen-year-olds did. She knew being unemployed in a difficult job market and living at home was a thing other nineteen-year-olds did. She was content doing neither of those, so she continued on and on and on at the pawnshop.

She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.

Because of the lack of working time in Night Vale, she went off her gut feeling about when the shop should close. When the feeling came, it came, and the doors had to be locked, removed from their frames, and safely hidden.

The feeling came. She swung her feet off the counter. A decent day.

Old Woman Josie, who lived out by the car lot, had come in with a great number of cheap plastic flamingos. She had carried them in a large canvas sack and emptied them onto the counter like loose change.

“It is not for myself that I give up these little ones,” said Old Woman Josie, addressing a bare wall several feet to the right of Jackie in a strong, formal voice, making the occasional sweeping gesture with her palm, “but for the future.”

Josie stopped, her palm still out. Jackie decided the speech was over.

“All right, man, I’ll give you eleven dollars,” she said. Old Woman Josie tightened her eyes at the bare wall.

“Ah, okay”—Jackie softened, prodding at one of the flamingos and looking at its weak plastic belly—“tell you what, I’ll give you a good night’s sleep.”

Old Woman Josie shrugged.

“I’ll take it.”

A good night’s sleep was a wildly generous offer. The flamingos were worthless, but there were so many of them, and Jackie couldn’t help herself. She never refused an item.

“Be careful not to touch those directly,” Josie said, after she was finished being dead.

Using shop rags, Jackie laid the flamingos out side by side on a shelf, each one tagged with a single handwritten eleven-dollar price tag. Most things shouldn’t be touched anyway, Jackie thought.

“Good-bye, dear,” said Josie, taking the ticket that Jackie had filled out. “Come by sometime and talk to the angels. They’ve been asking about you.”

The angels lived with Old Woman Josie, in her small tract home whose tract no longer stood, leaving it alone at the edge of town. The angels did chores for her, and Josie made a modest income selling items they had touched. No one understood why the angels lived with her. Very little was understood about the angels. Some things were.