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night vale fic: Miss Josie's Home for Totally Real Transdimensional Beings
Title: Miss Josie's Home for Totally Real Transdimensional Beings
Characters: Old Woman Josie, the angels
Rating: Gen
Words: ~2,400
Summary: The angels left Night Vale just after lunch on June 15, 1942. Josie remembers it like it was yesterday rather than seventy years ago -- of course, today could be seventy years ago rather than yesterday, depending on the current placement of Venus and the type of signals being transmitted from the abandoned gas station.
Notes: Written for![[personal profile]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=88)
juniperphoenix and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandom_stocking 2013.
[@AO3]
Miss Josie's Home for Totally Real Transdimensional Beings
According to the history books, Night Vale was founded by a group of bored and unmotivated explorers who were tired of traipsing across the hot, unforgiving desert with no respite from the sun and figured this scrubby patch of dirt was just as good as the next, especially if stopping meant they didn't lose any more men to the faceless, howling sand worms that once erupted through the earth's crust without warning to swallow the unsuspecting whole.
This is only partially correct. The truth is, only one half of the explorers allowed exhaustion and sore feet and the visceral fear of shadows silently arcing across the starless sky to cow them into downtrodden complacency. The other half, who had crested the next dune in hopes of escaping the rancid smell coming from the first half's cookfire, decided the land they stood upon must be holy and blessed indeed, as a group of angels were playing Bocce ball at the bottom of the rise, using a court marked by two magnificent yucca plants, an area that would eventually become the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex.
For their part, the angels were delighted with their new human companions. They had been sent to the desert at the dawn of time for a secret purpose they never divulged, but they had grown lonely in the last thousand years, and if the humans wanted to build crude structures of wood and bricks instead of allowing the angels to protect them from the elements with raw firmament -- well, the angels weren't going to argue. It gave the humans something to do, and it was always possible the angels would get a roof for their Bocce ball court.
+
In time, Night Vale flourished in the way all small, desert communities flourished -- buildings were built, only to become tired and worn from the sun and sand; plants were planted, only to wither and die in the relentless heat. Children were born, and every year a handful disappeared while playing in the Scrub Lands, first into black stagecoaches driven by black horses, then into several generations of black cars, and finally into black helicopters.
The angels, tall and radiant and untouched by the weather, blessed the land intended for the ancient Chalk Spire and lured the sand worms to another part of the desert through a complex combination of chanting and interpretive dance. They carved sigils on the cactus that compelled the kidnappers to return Night Vale's children better behaved and in a timely fashion, and they guided roadworkers into better plans for Route 800, away from a hidden sinkhole that would have swallowed the asphalt whole.
+
The angels left Night Vale just after lunch on June 15, 1942. Josie remembers it like it was yesterday rather than seventy years ago -- of course, today could be seventy years ago rather than yesterday, depending on the current placement of Venus and the type of signals being transmitted from the abandoned gas station.
They ascended to heaven with a sudden flash of bright, greenish-black light and a rolling of thunder so long and loud that the school superintendent called for an immediate, all-grades ammo drill and Grandpa Peters took his family, his dogs, and his two best alpacas and hid in the fallout shelter under his barn. Great cracks fissured down the center of Earl Avenue, and air raid sirens began screeching at the library. Briefly, time stopped.
Then, Mayor Randolph Waldorf waddled out of the secret chamber under the ancient Chalk Spire, shook his gnarled, liver-spotted fist, and shouted "good riddance you feathered vermin," at the angry, aubergine sky.
+
Shortly after the angels left, things in Night Vale took a turn for the worse.
The price of gas went up. The average daily temperature rose three degrees, and the Saturday mail delivery was often splattered with blood. The ring of fire surrounding Radon Canyon winked out, causing a number of citizens to be sucked into its yawning, pink-tinged void, until the City Council finally admitted there was a problem and covered it with a lead door. The sacred well dried up, killing its garden and leaving nothing behind but a deep hole in the center of the naked, barren lot behind the general store that would, in time, become the Ralph's. The creeping fear began coming and going whenever it pleased, instead of feeding on its previous schedule of new moons between two and five in the morning, as had been agreed between the first City Council and the gorgon who lived in the mythical shifting oasis outside the city, often thought to now be the fetid, alligator-infested swamp in the Scrub Lands.
The faithful prayed for the angels to return -- first publicly, leaving sanctuary candles burning in their windows and pouring fresh rosewater over the bloodstones in their backyards, and then, once the Sheriff's Secret Police began knocking on doors in the dead of night, privately, praying in basements and closets and attics and the abandoned mineshaft outside of town.
Hope briefly flickered among them when it rained fish along a five-miles stretch of Route 800 completely out of season, but in the end, the storm passed without the angels returning or explaining the reason for their abrupt disappearance. In fact, the only sound to be heard was Mayor Randolph Waldorf's voice, as he began proclaiming that angels did not actually exist, and that the unspoken promises about the Tiered Heavens had all been a social experiment carried out by a thuggish government agency he dared not name.
Margaret Johnson's suggestion that Mayor Randolph Waldorf had purposely offended the angels because their ability to see all possible futures and alternate realities was interfering with his wife's fortune-telling home business failed to gain any traction, possibly because it went unheard. No one was listening the first time she said it, and the Sheriff's Secret Police didn't give her a second chance.
Mrs. Waldorf continued to offer false prophecy to anyone with ten dollars and a half-hour to spare, dressed in a confusing costume of bangles and veils.
+
The angels return to Night Vale on a drably yellow Tuesday afternoon, just as Josie is boiling water for tea. She knows it's Tuesday because Tuesday is trash day in her neighborhood, and she sees a sanitation scooter trundling down the street when she opens the door.
It's a surprisingly quiet affair, without claps of thunder or flashes of light or plagues of frogs; Josie hears a sigh and a soft flutter of wings, then the loose board on the porch creeks and someone rings the bell. There are three of them -- the first with four wings and black skin and a nose sharp enough for a marble statue, the second with six wings and curly lilac hair and a feline face so pale it's almost blue, the third with wide mauve eyes and sunflowers braided into its violently yellow hair -- and they are just as beautiful and radiant as she remembers from her childhood. Their halos shine and quiver with holy light, and they are tall, so very tall, the ceiling of her home helpfully blurring into nothingness above their heads wherever they happen to be standing.
"I almost gave up on you," Josie admits. She has poured fresh rosewater on her bloodstone every Sunday for seventy years, and she puts a new candle in the window when the old one burns out, but she stopped truly believing the angels would ever return on August 9, 1981 -- the same day the ancient Chalk Spire was pulled down by a shrieking, bloodthirsty mob demanding that the library's biographies section be expanded.
The sunflower angel tips its head to one side. "We know." Its voice buzzes in Josie's ear like a swarm of bees. "But you are the only one left."
Josie doesn't understand what that means until three days later. When Spike, her pet pomeranian, tracks graveyard mud all over the living room carpet, she suddenly remembers that she is the oldest person in Night Vale, the only person in town who has ever seen an angel.
"And, I speak their native language," she tells Cecil on the phone that night, pacing the narrow confine of the sacred circle carved into the kitchen linoleum, the only place in the house she gets cell reception. "In my day, they taught Enochian in schools, not nonsense like Unmodified Sumerian."
"Lesser Enochian, surely."
"Oh, yes. Of course." Higher Enochian could cause a human's ears to bleed; Josie shivered and patted her bun at the thought. "This means we can't go bowling this week. I have to move the plastic flamingos out of my front yard to make room for the angels' Bocce ball court."
+
The angels play Bocce ball in the mornings, watch General Hospital in the afternoons, and lead each other in two hours of ritual songs and chanting in the evenings. They slip into the backyard after Josie goes to bed for the night, often flashing beams of red light at the trailer parked across the street or meeting with a man in a tan jacket under the lopsided Saguaro cactus Josie uses as a clothesline. One night, he buries a carved box beside the sunbleached coil of Josie's garden hose, hidden from sight by the shadows of the angels' wings; the angels tell Josie not to ask about the box so she doesn't, even when they have her move it to the other side of her yard a week later.
They accompany Josie on her weekly trip to the Ralph's each Friday, sitting in the back of her metallic blue, 1976 Buick Regal without having to slouch or squeeze together or winch in their wings. In Josie's opinion, Friday is the best day to do the grocery shopping, if you don't mind the 10 o'clock screaming from the seafood department; Friday is Double Secret Triple Coupon Day, but no one ever shows up for it because it's a secret. The content visit the library instead, because Friday is traditionally the librarians' hibernation day, and the troubled make their oblations to the Brownstone Spire, as it customary and expected.
The angels don't need to eat, but they quickly develop a taste for salty snacks -- pretzels, potato chips, cheese crackers, microwave pizza bites. Josie also buys five pounds of chicken feet and ten pounds of ground beef to throw over the rusty fence that separates her property from the car lot. No one really owns or operates the car lot, the gently-used cars simply sell themselves to whoever is in need of one, but the City Council uses the space as a corral for the silent, feral children that delivers its messages, and Josie has learned it is easier to just feed them twice a day, instead of listening to the constant thrashing all night, or waking up in the small hours of the morning to find them standing over her bed, making incoherent demands through a series of grunts and threatening hand gestures.
On Wednesdays, the angels fly down to the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. Josie isn't sure how they convince Teddy Williams to rent them bowling shoes or sell them buffalo wings when he cannot see them and wouldn't believe his eyes if he could, or how the people around them justify bowling balls hurtling down an apparently unused lane by an unseen force, but Josie never goes with them. She feels compelled to protect the mysterious box buried in her yard, often taking her afternoon tea outside so she can sit on the uneven pile of dirt that covers it.
The angels mow the lawn, and do the laundry, and change the lightbulbs, and take out the garbage. They take Spike for a walk when Josie's knee is acting up, and they intervene at a crucial moment when a routine Subway summoning goes sideways and nearly tears the roof off her house.
+
The sandstorm knocks out the cell tower before Josie can call Cecil and warn him about the impending doom. She sprinkles more angelica root inside her sacred circle, but her phone only flashes between one bar and zero before making the kind of sickly, twibble kind of noise that means the battery is on its last leg.
"Erika, I hate to ask, but -- "
"Of course," the lavender-haired angel says. It shifts between the couch and the computer between the blink of an eye, frowning faintly as it rests its hand on Josie's router, giving her just enough internet to upload a picture of her runes.
They come in twos. You come in twos. You and You. Kill your double.
+
"Good afternoon, ma'am," the policeman says, with a smile that, while polite, doesn't quite reach his eyes. "I'd like to ask you about the Tiered Heavens and the Hierarchy of Angels."
"There is no such thing," Josie replies patiently. She dislikes lying as a general rule, but she's getting to old for thought adjustments and reeducation programs. "You know that. Everyone knows that."
The policeman opens his mouth in argument, only to be cut off my a low thrum of Enochian, a chant too quiet and quick for Josie to translate. He tilts his head to the side, then clears his throat and adjusts his blue hood with a shaky hand. "Of course. Sorry to have bothered you."
+
The angels leave as abruptly as they came, just when Josie was getting used to the constant smell of camphor and dust and the way their voices make her teeth itch; she goes into the kitchen for five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea, and when she returns to the living room the angels have simply gone.
A week passes by, and then another, and then another. General Hospital goes unwatched, and the newest box of cheese crackers grows stale in the pantry. Once, the man in the tan jacket knocks on Josie's front door, his face unremarkable in the turquoise burn of dawn, but Josie doesn't remember what he wanted after he left or what she said to make him go away. Eventually, she decides she must have bored the angels or offended them in some way -- at least, until the sweltering Tuesday morning poor Vithia disappears in a familiar flash of greenish-black light. Josie is at Big Rico's when it happens, because she likes to get her weekly quota out of the way as early as possible; when she gets back to her house, she finds a note pinned to the prickly pear on the porch.
Josie smiles. She lights a new candle, and pours a fresh handful of rosewater over her bloodstone.
Characters: Old Woman Josie, the angels
Rating: Gen
Words: ~2,400
Summary: The angels left Night Vale just after lunch on June 15, 1942. Josie remembers it like it was yesterday rather than seventy years ago -- of course, today could be seventy years ago rather than yesterday, depending on the current placement of Venus and the type of signals being transmitted from the abandoned gas station.
Notes: Written for
juniperphoenix and fandom_stocking 2013.[@AO3]
According to the history books, Night Vale was founded by a group of bored and unmotivated explorers who were tired of traipsing across the hot, unforgiving desert with no respite from the sun and figured this scrubby patch of dirt was just as good as the next, especially if stopping meant they didn't lose any more men to the faceless, howling sand worms that once erupted through the earth's crust without warning to swallow the unsuspecting whole.
This is only partially correct. The truth is, only one half of the explorers allowed exhaustion and sore feet and the visceral fear of shadows silently arcing across the starless sky to cow them into downtrodden complacency. The other half, who had crested the next dune in hopes of escaping the rancid smell coming from the first half's cookfire, decided the land they stood upon must be holy and blessed indeed, as a group of angels were playing Bocce ball at the bottom of the rise, using a court marked by two magnificent yucca plants, an area that would eventually become the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex.
For their part, the angels were delighted with their new human companions. They had been sent to the desert at the dawn of time for a secret purpose they never divulged, but they had grown lonely in the last thousand years, and if the humans wanted to build crude structures of wood and bricks instead of allowing the angels to protect them from the elements with raw firmament -- well, the angels weren't going to argue. It gave the humans something to do, and it was always possible the angels would get a roof for their Bocce ball court.
+
In time, Night Vale flourished in the way all small, desert communities flourished -- buildings were built, only to become tired and worn from the sun and sand; plants were planted, only to wither and die in the relentless heat. Children were born, and every year a handful disappeared while playing in the Scrub Lands, first into black stagecoaches driven by black horses, then into several generations of black cars, and finally into black helicopters.
The angels, tall and radiant and untouched by the weather, blessed the land intended for the ancient Chalk Spire and lured the sand worms to another part of the desert through a complex combination of chanting and interpretive dance. They carved sigils on the cactus that compelled the kidnappers to return Night Vale's children better behaved and in a timely fashion, and they guided roadworkers into better plans for Route 800, away from a hidden sinkhole that would have swallowed the asphalt whole.
+
The angels left Night Vale just after lunch on June 15, 1942. Josie remembers it like it was yesterday rather than seventy years ago -- of course, today could be seventy years ago rather than yesterday, depending on the current placement of Venus and the type of signals being transmitted from the abandoned gas station.
They ascended to heaven with a sudden flash of bright, greenish-black light and a rolling of thunder so long and loud that the school superintendent called for an immediate, all-grades ammo drill and Grandpa Peters took his family, his dogs, and his two best alpacas and hid in the fallout shelter under his barn. Great cracks fissured down the center of Earl Avenue, and air raid sirens began screeching at the library. Briefly, time stopped.
Then, Mayor Randolph Waldorf waddled out of the secret chamber under the ancient Chalk Spire, shook his gnarled, liver-spotted fist, and shouted "good riddance you feathered vermin," at the angry, aubergine sky.
+
Shortly after the angels left, things in Night Vale took a turn for the worse.
The price of gas went up. The average daily temperature rose three degrees, and the Saturday mail delivery was often splattered with blood. The ring of fire surrounding Radon Canyon winked out, causing a number of citizens to be sucked into its yawning, pink-tinged void, until the City Council finally admitted there was a problem and covered it with a lead door. The sacred well dried up, killing its garden and leaving nothing behind but a deep hole in the center of the naked, barren lot behind the general store that would, in time, become the Ralph's. The creeping fear began coming and going whenever it pleased, instead of feeding on its previous schedule of new moons between two and five in the morning, as had been agreed between the first City Council and the gorgon who lived in the mythical shifting oasis outside the city, often thought to now be the fetid, alligator-infested swamp in the Scrub Lands.
The faithful prayed for the angels to return -- first publicly, leaving sanctuary candles burning in their windows and pouring fresh rosewater over the bloodstones in their backyards, and then, once the Sheriff's Secret Police began knocking on doors in the dead of night, privately, praying in basements and closets and attics and the abandoned mineshaft outside of town.
Hope briefly flickered among them when it rained fish along a five-miles stretch of Route 800 completely out of season, but in the end, the storm passed without the angels returning or explaining the reason for their abrupt disappearance. In fact, the only sound to be heard was Mayor Randolph Waldorf's voice, as he began proclaiming that angels did not actually exist, and that the unspoken promises about the Tiered Heavens had all been a social experiment carried out by a thuggish government agency he dared not name.
Margaret Johnson's suggestion that Mayor Randolph Waldorf had purposely offended the angels because their ability to see all possible futures and alternate realities was interfering with his wife's fortune-telling home business failed to gain any traction, possibly because it went unheard. No one was listening the first time she said it, and the Sheriff's Secret Police didn't give her a second chance.
Mrs. Waldorf continued to offer false prophecy to anyone with ten dollars and a half-hour to spare, dressed in a confusing costume of bangles and veils.
+
The angels return to Night Vale on a drably yellow Tuesday afternoon, just as Josie is boiling water for tea. She knows it's Tuesday because Tuesday is trash day in her neighborhood, and she sees a sanitation scooter trundling down the street when she opens the door.
It's a surprisingly quiet affair, without claps of thunder or flashes of light or plagues of frogs; Josie hears a sigh and a soft flutter of wings, then the loose board on the porch creeks and someone rings the bell. There are three of them -- the first with four wings and black skin and a nose sharp enough for a marble statue, the second with six wings and curly lilac hair and a feline face so pale it's almost blue, the third with wide mauve eyes and sunflowers braided into its violently yellow hair -- and they are just as beautiful and radiant as she remembers from her childhood. Their halos shine and quiver with holy light, and they are tall, so very tall, the ceiling of her home helpfully blurring into nothingness above their heads wherever they happen to be standing.
"I almost gave up on you," Josie admits. She has poured fresh rosewater on her bloodstone every Sunday for seventy years, and she puts a new candle in the window when the old one burns out, but she stopped truly believing the angels would ever return on August 9, 1981 -- the same day the ancient Chalk Spire was pulled down by a shrieking, bloodthirsty mob demanding that the library's biographies section be expanded.
The sunflower angel tips its head to one side. "We know." Its voice buzzes in Josie's ear like a swarm of bees. "But you are the only one left."
Josie doesn't understand what that means until three days later. When Spike, her pet pomeranian, tracks graveyard mud all over the living room carpet, she suddenly remembers that she is the oldest person in Night Vale, the only person in town who has ever seen an angel.
"And, I speak their native language," she tells Cecil on the phone that night, pacing the narrow confine of the sacred circle carved into the kitchen linoleum, the only place in the house she gets cell reception. "In my day, they taught Enochian in schools, not nonsense like Unmodified Sumerian."
"Lesser Enochian, surely."
"Oh, yes. Of course." Higher Enochian could cause a human's ears to bleed; Josie shivered and patted her bun at the thought. "This means we can't go bowling this week. I have to move the plastic flamingos out of my front yard to make room for the angels' Bocce ball court."
+
The angels play Bocce ball in the mornings, watch General Hospital in the afternoons, and lead each other in two hours of ritual songs and chanting in the evenings. They slip into the backyard after Josie goes to bed for the night, often flashing beams of red light at the trailer parked across the street or meeting with a man in a tan jacket under the lopsided Saguaro cactus Josie uses as a clothesline. One night, he buries a carved box beside the sunbleached coil of Josie's garden hose, hidden from sight by the shadows of the angels' wings; the angels tell Josie not to ask about the box so she doesn't, even when they have her move it to the other side of her yard a week later.
They accompany Josie on her weekly trip to the Ralph's each Friday, sitting in the back of her metallic blue, 1976 Buick Regal without having to slouch or squeeze together or winch in their wings. In Josie's opinion, Friday is the best day to do the grocery shopping, if you don't mind the 10 o'clock screaming from the seafood department; Friday is Double Secret Triple Coupon Day, but no one ever shows up for it because it's a secret. The content visit the library instead, because Friday is traditionally the librarians' hibernation day, and the troubled make their oblations to the Brownstone Spire, as it customary and expected.
The angels don't need to eat, but they quickly develop a taste for salty snacks -- pretzels, potato chips, cheese crackers, microwave pizza bites. Josie also buys five pounds of chicken feet and ten pounds of ground beef to throw over the rusty fence that separates her property from the car lot. No one really owns or operates the car lot, the gently-used cars simply sell themselves to whoever is in need of one, but the City Council uses the space as a corral for the silent, feral children that delivers its messages, and Josie has learned it is easier to just feed them twice a day, instead of listening to the constant thrashing all night, or waking up in the small hours of the morning to find them standing over her bed, making incoherent demands through a series of grunts and threatening hand gestures.
On Wednesdays, the angels fly down to the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. Josie isn't sure how they convince Teddy Williams to rent them bowling shoes or sell them buffalo wings when he cannot see them and wouldn't believe his eyes if he could, or how the people around them justify bowling balls hurtling down an apparently unused lane by an unseen force, but Josie never goes with them. She feels compelled to protect the mysterious box buried in her yard, often taking her afternoon tea outside so she can sit on the uneven pile of dirt that covers it.
The angels mow the lawn, and do the laundry, and change the lightbulbs, and take out the garbage. They take Spike for a walk when Josie's knee is acting up, and they intervene at a crucial moment when a routine Subway summoning goes sideways and nearly tears the roof off her house.
+
The sandstorm knocks out the cell tower before Josie can call Cecil and warn him about the impending doom. She sprinkles more angelica root inside her sacred circle, but her phone only flashes between one bar and zero before making the kind of sickly, twibble kind of noise that means the battery is on its last leg.
"Erika, I hate to ask, but -- "
"Of course," the lavender-haired angel says. It shifts between the couch and the computer between the blink of an eye, frowning faintly as it rests its hand on Josie's router, giving her just enough internet to upload a picture of her runes.
They come in twos. You come in twos. You and You. Kill your double.
+
"Good afternoon, ma'am," the policeman says, with a smile that, while polite, doesn't quite reach his eyes. "I'd like to ask you about the Tiered Heavens and the Hierarchy of Angels."
"There is no such thing," Josie replies patiently. She dislikes lying as a general rule, but she's getting to old for thought adjustments and reeducation programs. "You know that. Everyone knows that."
The policeman opens his mouth in argument, only to be cut off my a low thrum of Enochian, a chant too quiet and quick for Josie to translate. He tilts his head to the side, then clears his throat and adjusts his blue hood with a shaky hand. "Of course. Sorry to have bothered you."
+
The angels leave as abruptly as they came, just when Josie was getting used to the constant smell of camphor and dust and the way their voices make her teeth itch; she goes into the kitchen for five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea, and when she returns to the living room the angels have simply gone.
A week passes by, and then another, and then another. General Hospital goes unwatched, and the newest box of cheese crackers grows stale in the pantry. Once, the man in the tan jacket knocks on Josie's front door, his face unremarkable in the turquoise burn of dawn, but Josie doesn't remember what he wanted after he left or what she said to make him go away. Eventually, she decides she must have bored the angels or offended them in some way -- at least, until the sweltering Tuesday morning poor Vithia disappears in a familiar flash of greenish-black light. Josie is at Big Rico's when it happens, because she likes to get her weekly quota out of the way as early as possible; when she gets back to her house, she finds a note pinned to the prickly pear on the porch.
Josie smiles. She lights a new candle, and pours a fresh handful of rosewater over her bloodstone.