Before They Were Night Vale: On This Day In History

Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our feature in which Night Vale creators Jeffrey and Joseph share writing from before their Welcome to Night Vale collaboration, along with commentary. Come explore their early writing, both good and bad.

Joseph: Most of the details on this one have fallen out of my memory. It was an entry for a writing contest, I remember that. Flash fiction. The judge was Ann Patchett, I believe. There was some sort of prompt, an image or plot element that had to serve as the inspiration. I wrote this little elliptical piece. I think it's an ok bit of writing, although Ann made the right choice when she picked someone else as the winner.

*****

On This Day In History

The nurse left work at five o'clock. The doctor took a coffee break at six, read a few pages of a Grisham, and did not finish his coffee. I folded the sheets down so that only my legs were covered. There are things you can control, things you can depend on.

Once, and this was some time back, I was on a business trip in Vegas with a guy called Mark. We shared a hotel room to save money. It was small, but with a view of the whole strip. We would push a table against the curtain when we slept to block out the light, but the ceiling still flashed red and yellow and blue. Even my dreams were those colors.

There was a night, the third night, or maybe the fourth. Maybe Mark had a girl there or maybe he didn’t. I remember him talking to someone who wasn’t me. He might have been on the phone with a client. Lying on my back, looking the light on the ceiling, I suddenly had an idea. I don’t remember what the idea was, only that it was something about time, and the desert that you could barely see between the hotels, and Mark and me and all the rest of us.

I turned to tell him, and whoever else, if there was someone else. But, when I did, I bumped this lamp, this ceramic lamp on the bedstand, and it fell, breaking onto the carpet. Just unsalvageable. Gone. By then I had forgotten what I was going to say, and Mark was telling me that it was ok, we’d pay for the lamp. The hotel would put in on the bill. But it didn’t seem right to me, that it could break like that, that the hotel would put it on the bill as though an accident were an item that you could buy.

So I picked up the pieces. There were hundreds of them. The lamp was gone, just unsalvageable. It took two hours to get every piece into a plastic bag, and the whole time Mark watched me. There wasn’t anyone else by then. Maybe they had left. I put all the pieces into a bag and I put the bag into my luggage and the next day I threw the bag into a public trashcan a couple blocks from the hotel. We never did get charged for the lamp. I haven’t thought about that lamp in years, or the colors on the ceiling. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently.

The nurse came back to work at seven o’clock. The doctor took another coffee break, another few pages of Grisham, and didn’t finish his coffee. I unfolded the sheet so it covered me up to my neck and I tried to sleep. There are things you can control, things you can depend on. And then, somewhere in the Nevada desert, there’s this plastic bag full of broken ceramic. Just unsalvageable, gone. That’s part of it too.