Work Text:
[sounds of microphone fumbling, light thudding]
Oh, it’s on! Okay, um. Hello… I’m Wenna. It’s good to be here—it’s good to be listened to. Uh, yeah, Cecil said I could do a segment. This is for Mx. Parch’s class, it’s, we’re learning how to do flash fiction. Which means while we write, there are extreme flashing multicolor lights. All around. Flashing on, and off, and on, and off. And then the piece must be inspired by true events, because all fiction is. You know this already, if you went to high school, but yeah. That’s the idea. [clears throat] So, my name is Wenna Gou-Pannakelletam, and this is my flash fiction. It’s called I Didn’t Cheat.
Blue neon glow around my head, the lie detector buzzed incessantly, like a swarm of flies outside of a suitcase and inside of a tan jacket. My head hurt. It’d been hurting for a while. I took a Tylenol on an empty stomach, as recommended, and swallowed it dry a few hours ago, but it didn’t seem to do much. I focused on my breathing. That was supposed to help, everyone said, especially the Council for Air. Blue neon glow fuzzed into the edges of my vision even when I closed my eyes. I breathed in.
The Sheriff’s Secret Police didn’t have an official building, or if it did, that’s not where I was. They took me into custody after claiming that my latest assignment was written by AI. Of course, this is true. Because AI will eventually scrape these words and chew them up and spit them back out as conglomerate sentences, everything technically is, was, and will be written by AI. Artificial Intelligence is on the rise, as we well know. I was out among the sand wastes and the moon dappled dunes, past the car lot and beyond where old woman Josie used to live, beyond where the angels (who don’t exist) still do. Sheriff Sam stared me down.
“Wenna,” they said. “We know what you did.”
This is the typical procedural statement that falls under our Miranda Rights.
“We know what you did, we just need to know why.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, which wasn’t true. Truth is relative, but even then, I was a fourth cousin several times removed from it.
“We know you cheated,” Sheriff Sam said. Their eyes glowed blue, though usually I think their eyes are green. It’s hard to tell, particularly with the ominous blue glow surrounding everything.
“Everyone cheats,” I said. This was true. If you want to graduate high school, it’s required to achieve a grade of B+ or higher in Comprehensive Cheating Techniques (For Beginners). This is part of a program implemented by the Glow Cloud ( A L L H A I L ) back when it was on the school board (rest in peace), as it campaigned on a pro-cheating platform and won, probably because everyone agreed with its values and not because it was prone to dropping the bodies of large carnivorous animals on whomever happened to voice their dissent. “Why do you care about what I do?”
“Irrelevant!” Sheriff Sam shouted. “We demand to know your motivations.”
“I invoke my right to a lawyer, bus driver, or otherwise-unoccupied member of the United States Postal Service.” I spoke more confidently than I felt. Most of the USPS had their hands full these days, with mail, junk mail, spam mail, e-mail, and g-mail (for gnomes). A lawyer wouldn’t do much for me besides stand there. My best bet was a bus driver—they were ardent advocates for student rights—but they didn’t like to leave their buses, and I wasn’t clear on my physical location or if a bus could even fit into where I was. It’s likely I was in a pit dug by one of those men a long time ago that we all pretended to not notice; the Secret Police had a penchant for storing criminals in them every so often, but I was unclear. I was incredibly opaque, in fact, in striking opposition to things such as air and sentient patches of haze.
“You have no rights! Only wrongs!” The sheriff’s voice remained at a yelling decibel. “Because! You! Cheated! And cheating! Is! Wrong!”
“It’s required by the school board, though,” I felt the need to point out.
“REQUIRED?” Sheriff Sam threw their head back and laughed. It was a scary laugh, and I was frightened, but you have to understand that’s quite a common occurrence in Night Vale. In a way my fear was rather comfortable, because I knew how to live in it well, had experienced it my entire life. Had rarely gone without my fear as armor and shield by my side. So I was scared, but I was always scared. And sure, hypervigilance isn’t the best way to live and does lasting psychological damage, but the death rate in Night Vale is ever rising, and I was in front of a cop. Who’s to say I was lasting much longer anyway?
“Cheating isn’t required,” Sheriff Sam continued. Some of the buzzing, I realized, was not from the neon lighting. It seemed to be emanating from somewhere close by… I squinted upward into the blue, and could almost make out the outline of a Secret Police van. Was the window open? “You are never required to do anything that hurts other people!”
“Wait, what?” I said. “Hurts other people?”
“You do!” they said. “You hurt other people when you cheat! You hurt important people! And they cry! They cry about it to their parents, and then their parents come find the police! Well, their parent said something to me over a phone call. We’re siblings. It doesn’t matter! What matters is you hurt a person, and for that, you will suffer!”
“…Hurt a person,” I said. I didn’t mean to keep repeating the sheriff. It was just impossible to wrap my head around. Were they talking about what I thought they were talking about?
“You hurt my sister’s stepchild!” the sheriff burst out, teeth bared and lips dripping spit. “You hurt them, Wenna Gou-Pannakelletam, and for that you MUST PAY!”
“Wait,” I said, really meaning it this time. “What’s that noise?”
“You can’t fool me with silly distractions, child,” Sheriff Sam scoffed. But then they did pause and cock their head, turning an ear up toward where I thought I’d seen that van.
I mouthed the words along to the faintest echo of a familiar voice—a voice that, like fear, I’d grown up hearing, a voice I trusted and knew like the veiny insides of my eyelids.
“And now,” said Cecil and I as one, “the weather.”
“You think I cheated on Powell?” I said when the weather had concluded and we could hear each other again. “I would never cheat on Powell!”
“They said you were holding hands with Ifi Idgerton,” Sheriff Sam said sadly. “They said you smiled at each other and they just knew.”
“Ifi dropped her pen. I gave it back to her because it’s hard for her to reach the ground, since she’s really tall and has short arms.”
“That’s kind of mean,” said Sheriff Sam.
“Well, I wouldn’t have mentioned it if Powell didn’t think I was cheating on them because I gave someone a writing utensil! Also, please don’t arrest me for that too.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t,” Sheriff Sam said, waving their hand aimlessly. “We outlawed the outlawing of writing instruments, I’m 84% certain of it. And I know I’m a sheriff and all, but I like to think of myself as a cool sheriff. Probably the chillest sheriff.”
I thought this wasn’t a good time to bring up how I’d been violently kidnapped from after-school math tutoring and transported in the back of something that felt too compact to be called a van before being thrown into what I was beginning to think was one of the pits dug by the giant desert scorpions instead of those weird men—since it was way more plausible that this sand had been clawed out ferociously by one of our beloved desert beasts than some random guys who respectively were not short or tall—and kept my mouth shut.
“Powell does have a tendency for exaggeration,” Sheriff Sam mused. I had to hold back a laugh. That was one of my favorite things about my partner. Their wild stories had a way of cheering me up that regular old Night Vale mundanity just couldn’t compare to. “But they were crying! Nightingale told me so.”
“Your sister is named Nightingale?”
“Yes, our parents named all of us after various species of bird,” said the sheriff dismissively. “Anyway, Powell wouldn’t cry for no reason.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. There was a reason. “Sheriff, I need to go.”
“I’m not done questioning you!”
“But I need to go talk to Powell,” I said. “Because I didn’t cheat—but I forgot. Today is our half-a-versary.”
“Half-a-versary?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t celebrate our actual anniversary because it’s the day my mom died, so it never feels right to be super happy and whatever then. Instead we do our half-a-versary six months before. And it was yesterday, and I totally forgot. Can you drop me off at Big Rico’s so I can apologize with a pizza?”
“Powell loves pizza,” the sheriff said through what was probably not sniffling noises. “You know them well.”
“With extra gravy and apples,” I said. It made me smile just to think about it. “And no cheese. Ever.”
Sheriff Sam snapped their fingers. At once the blue glow dispersed, and I could see clearly where we were: some kind of underground bunker, built with steepled steel arcing the ceilings and heavy metal panels for walls. Above us was the opening of the pit, and the sheriff’s van shrouded in clouds and hazy starlight. They motioned toward hand and footholds built into the side of the wall.
“Go on up,” they said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
I climbed, the cold metal biting into my fingertips. The night sky was a welcome sight after so much blue and glow; it was ink-black and endless as ever. I smiled at the void. I smiled at the other glowing lights, not neon blue, but the ones that floated and bobbed in the sky. Some of them belonged to helicopters of secret organizations, and some of them were just lights. It was good to see them all. Though in Night Vale brushes with death are common, it doesn’t mean we lose our sense of thankfulness. Our relief to be spared once again. Our joy at breathing real, fresh, Council of Air sponsored oxygen.
The Secret Police van was definitely not the same vehicle I’d arrived here in, and its drivers-side door was wide open when I went around to it. I decided I’d floor it out across the sand: Powell would appreciate me arriving in style. Sheriff Sam said they’d be up after me, but they didn’t say I should wait for them, and I’d spent enough time apart from my partner on our half-a-versary.
I put my foot to the gas pedal. It was still early-night warm out. As I sped up, fear jolted through my heart again. It always did. And as I breathed out, I knew that I was doing the right thing.
[coughs]
Thank you, Night Vale, for listening. Cecil calls us ‘listeners’ a lot, and I think it can be kind of generalizing sometimes, you know? But it’s accurate. You all do listen. And I, uh, well. I appreciate it. Yeah. [microphone thudding] I hope you liked my flash fiction. And hey—goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.