All That Lingers by Shaymaa Abusalih

"Now, can anyone tell me the three things you must do when faced with the indecision and doubt that is sure to grip you at an age when years of indoctrination slowly being to slacken despite the government's wholehearted effort to funnel tax dollars down a hole of extensive research programs to perfect the methods that would otherwise remove said indecision and doubt?"

Lee's hand went up mechanically, like the flag on a mailbox while no one else's did. She was the only person in her entire class that ever did the reading. She couldn't blame them though. At some point repetition becomes too repetitive and you lose the reader completely. She had nothing better to do though, so the words "Do not think. Think nothing. Nothing is forever." were seared into her brain (and without much purpose too because, once again, the teacher did not see her hand or even her).

It was a rough transition, being ignored again. There were times she couldn't understand why it bothered her so much. She had spent her whole life existing outside the cognizance of others. It had always been a bit annoying but never this disheartening.

"What was different now?" she would ask herself because there was no one else to ask.

But then, when her feet carried her by memory to the Tracker's house and there was no swish of that great big plume of feathers coming down the street to greet her, she'd remember. Being ignored hurt far less than being left behind. And there was absolutely nothing going on today that could distract her from these thoughts that buzzed just as mercilessly as a beaver biting down on a power line.

Lee turned around from where she stood so solitarily on the sidewalk and trudged back in the direction of her grandmother's house.

Everything was eerily quiet. This was mostly due to the fact that no one dared to get even remotely close to the Tracker or his stead. (The townsfolk often thought his flagrant racism would ooze out of every pore on his indisputably Caucasian complexion and infect them with some sort of archaic God complex that would lead to the near genocide and enslavement of all minorities that came within their "claimed" territory.) But mostly because for once, it was not just Lee Harper that did not exist to the world – for once, the world did not exist to Lee Harper.

In that moment, there was clarity. Though, she couldn't have known for sure. A moment of clarity is identified and desperately sought after by those who need clarity. Lee had no need for one. She was not sure she really needed anything but she knew what she wanted.

There were two things, in fact, that she wanted very badly. The first being answers – in whatever form they were presented, to whatever question they were in relation to – and the second was an afternoon of homework spent on a cheap rug of $5.67 which smelled faintly of caramel popcorn. Unfortunately for her, both these things required the presence of a certain pale aboriginal.

Though she might have not known it, what Lee Harper needed was a distraction. And whether deliberately or not, she did just that. She distracted herself the only way she knew how. She pressed her glossy, red headphones to her tiny ears and listened to the radio.

Not so long ago, but long enough for something of significance to happen which Lee would be completely unaware of, not only for the sake of plot but also because she wasn't old enough to remember any of it…

Earnest Emmett Everett Harper was the name which a particular 1975 Bricklin SV1 was registered under and it was Earnest Emmett Everett Harper that sat in the driver's seat of that candied-apple red, disaster wagon.

"Disaster wagon" was a term coined by his wife the day he pushed that infamous car into the driveway of their home. Earnest Emmett Everett never had much luck when it came to bets, but this car was the exception. And despite the gaudy color and the fire hazard that had been briefly mentioned to him when the keys were being handed over, there was nothing he treasured more.

Well, actually, there were two things.

That lazy weekend afternoon, the citizens of NightVale could see that car crawling its way down each scorching road. Some of them would see the familiar man driving and wave.

"Hey, Everett!"

"How's it going, Emmett?"

"Looking good, Earnest!"

There was really no point in struggling through his entire name, so every person who had known Earnest Emmett Everett usually settled for one of the three – something his parents never managed to do. The closest and cleverest of his friends called him Tripoli, his wife simply called him "E" and his daughter, so young and round in the face, called him "Daddy" - as of last week.

As said before, the Bricklin was one of his three treasures and he took great care of it – washing, waxing, and taking it out for a drive the way one would take a dog out for a walk. It was on one of these drives that his life changed forever. Not only because of the two arrows that had come flying out of nowhere, piercing through the fiberglass panel of the driver's side door and not only because of the deer he hit promptly after he jerked the steering wheel back and forth in a panic. His life changed because of the man he met that day, who had come just as quickly, just as mysteriously as the two arrows and the deer.

After shaking the glass from his tan jacket and maneuvering around the arrowheads to get to the door handle, he stumbled out onto the street.

The deer lay twisted on the ground just near the left, front tire, its eyes a glassy void, its mouth open just wide enough for him to see a thick, pink tongue hanging slackly against its jaw.

Luckily, he was the only car driving on the street at the time and strangely, he and the strange man were the only two people there for as far as he could see in both directions.

Earnest or Everett or Emmett – whatever you'd like to call him – stepped toward the man and asked, "Are you alright?"

Clearly, it was the man who should have been asking that question. He was the one responsible for Everett's car being hit by two arrows and for the deer being hit by the car. Still, the man gave no indication that he had noticed Earnest and looked around at the buildings and lamps and the hard, hot ground beneath his feet. This, in turn, gave Emmett the chance to look at him.

He was very large, large in that he was bigger than the average grown man and had a firm, bare chest that reminded Everett of the men in those magazines his wife was so found of. And he could have easily gotten over the fact that the man was shirtless had it not been for the feather headdress perched atop his head. Obviously, this man was late for some sort of costume party if not incredibly racist.

Nevertheless, Earnest decided against lecturing the man on cultural appropriation and decided to ask his question again.

"Hey, Buddy, are you alright?"

The man pinned him with a dark stare, his eyes just as dark as the deer's. Though, unlike the deer, these eyes were not empty. Instead, there were full to the brim with questions and perhaps, a measure of hatred.

Everett figured that the only way to deal with the situation was to keep talking and hope he said something right. "That was a close one, wouldn't you say? Poor thing just jumped right out in front of me."

The man must have been able to make some sense of what Emmett was saying, because his eyes softened to curiosity and were more cautious than hateful now. "Dil." he said.

Earnest was hopelessly confused by this. It had barely registered with him that this man was speaking another language. It would have never occurred to him that a man of possibly Slavic origins could be speaking Southern Athabaskan.

"I'm sorry, what?" Emmett frowned. "Dill?"

The man nodded. "Dil."

"You mean like a pickle?"

The man said again, "Dil." and pointed to the cut on Everett's head. "Di-tsii dil."

Eventually, Earnest understood what he was trying to say and gently touched the tips of his fingers to the cut.

"Eh, that's not too bad. I've had worse." he shrugged. "But you didn't answer my question. Are you okay?"

The man was silent again.

Emmett gave himself a moment to think before he ventured to speak again. "Are you – uh…dil? Dil?"

Unbeknownst to him, Everett had just told the man "blood" even though he was not bleeding. Still, Nitis, not sure of what had happened, looked down at himself to see if he was bleeding just to make sure. Regrettably for him, it was much worse than that.

The skin that he had known his whole life, that smooth, brown skin was now a sickly, pale color. A shade even lighter than the man that stood before him. The same words his comrades had shrieked before running away were bubbling in his mind – "evil spirit", "cursed", and "demon". Now he knew of his mistake and without delay, he turned around and began to search for that same invisible gate, hoping to correct what had gone so terribly wrong.

Earnest watched the man pace back and forth, trying to retrace his steps and feeling around the air. The man was such an interest to him that he barely paid any mind to the damage that had been done to his precious Bricklin or even the cut on his head. And all the while, he watched and pondered because this man's arrival to NightVale was not the strangest thing to have happened lately.

Grandma Josie and her band of heavenly guest weren't there when Lee got home which was a relief, considering the blinding, probing glow that came off of them. It made it near impossible to sleep at nights when their lights shined throughout the house. There was not a single shadow to be found or to escape to. Lee had to resort to wearing three sleeping masks, one on top of the other, to keep it properly shut out.

Though Grandma Josie would do no such thing in return, Lee wondered where she had gotten to. She set her bag down at the base of the stairs and went into the kitchen to see if her grandmother had made anything to eat while she was away at school. She was happy to find a plate of lemon chicken leftover from last night, topped with a handful of pine needles.

After heating it up, she sat down to eat, unplugging her headphones from the radio and setting it down on the table. Cecil's voice continued to fill the silence of the world around her.

She listened for a while and learned that Grandma Josie had gone out to get gas, which was curious because just last week, she had filled up the ornate, gas lamps that lined the upstairs hallway. Though, it might have not been for the lamps at all – what with the celestial light blasting through every corner of the house. It might have been for her car. Maybe. Probably. But that wasn't likely.

Lee went on chewing chicken and feeling numb. The day's events didn't seem in any way significant to her, which was a good thing to those trying very hard to redirect the public's attention away from the Shape Formerly in Grove Park that No One Acknowledges or Speaks About. It was only until Cecil said, "And now a continuation of our previous investigation into whether I am literally the only person in the world, speaking to myself in a fit of madness caused by my inability to admit the tragedy of my own existence." that her interest was genuinely peaked.

At first, she was amused. Of course he was real, of course he existed. If only he knew what it really meant to not exist. Speaking from experience, she could probably tell him all about it, but seeing as how she didn't exist it wasn't like he'd remember. This led her to be angry rather than amused. How dare he even think that he could suffer such a terrible fate, how dare he even worry about such things happening when there were those in this town, such as herself, that listened to him on the radio. But then, she realized, perhaps he could be right. After all, if she didn't exist, she couldn't really call herself one of his "dear listeners" could she? And even though she heard him, it did not matter because she did not matter. Her anger fizzled out like hot iron in water. She grew concerned and was sad once again. She thought everyone deserved to exist. Cecil most of all.

Lee set down her fork, ran upstairs to grab her blazer and rushed back out into the night.

We go back once again to that time of significance…

Up until that day, Norma Gene Harper was sure that her husband could do nothing worse than push that Bricklin SV1 into the driveway of their home. But that day she learned that pushing in a Brickin SV1 with a smashed windshield, traces of blood and fur on the front bumper, two arrows in its side and a dead deer tied across the roof was infinitely worse.

With her arms crossed tightly in front of her and with her lips pressed into a thin, frustrated line, she glowered at her husband and ignored the half-naked man at his side. Earnest could only smile, as he always did when looking upon his beautiful wife.

She stood a half-inch taller than him, but not always because she wore heels. She had a strange fondness for wearing heels around the house. It gave her a powerful, feminine feeling. She also found that heels were quite useful when she needed to glower at her husband from a certain height. She always wore dresses with an apron tied around her waist. The apron wasn't just her cooking apron, but her everything apron. None of her dresses ever had pockets but her aprons did and she was just as fond as pockets as she was a nice pair of heels. She could, of course, just wear a purse around the house to hold all the various things she thought needed stowing away, but that would just be silly. She only wore makeup on the days she felt like it and her skin was far too pale and smooth for any resident of a friendly desert community. Her eyes were a lovely shade of brown. And her hair, as gold as grain, was always so neatly coifed and curled, like every beautiful woman in a black and white movie.

"E, what the hell happened this time?" she growled at him.

"I hit a deer."

"I can see that. But how did that happen?"

"My car got hit with some arrows."

"And whose fault is that?"

"Well, I'm not sure but I think I might be his." said E, laying a hand on the pale shoulder of the man beside him.

Nitis did not react to his touch. He was in a sort of trance, as though he were spiraling down, down, down into a realm of hexes and questions. He was absolutely shattered. All that he had known and loved had been destroyed and paved over. He knew this desert, it was the same desert, but it was not his. He was alone, without a home and with no way of getting back. But those three things would come to change in time and in ways he would never expect.

He had Earnest Emmett Everett Harper to thank for that because it was Earnest Emmett Everett Harper who, with a comforting smile, led him into one of the many houses that stood in the Desert Creek Housing Development.

Once inside, Emmett showed Nitis around, gesturing at different rooms and pointing at several of the memorabilia found all about the house. Nitis stared at the strange things around him and was only somewhat curious. Norma Gene stared at him with all the inquisition of a cat.

Her anger slowly dwindled because of this and also because of the few, shameless glances she made toward his rippling, bare chest.

The tour finally came to an end when they reached the nursery. It was a small, well-lit room with walls that were painted a soft green and plush animals piled up in one corner. Sitting against the opposite wall was a cheap, white crib that had a mobile of pink sheep hanging over it.

"Try to be quiet." Norma Gene begged softly. "I just put her to sleep."

Nitis could understand this request enough and tread softly over the carpet as he approached the crib with them. When he looked inside, he was astonished to find that there was an infant sleeping in there. He found it strange that the child should be left to lie exposed in its little space, rather than wrapped up firmly in a blanket and carried by its mother.

For whatever time or place he may have been in, he concluded that the white men and women were just as strange as the ones he had encountered in his time.

"Beautiful isn't she?" Everett whispered, staring lovingly down at his daughter.

She wasn't really. A writer can say this with all honesty. His daughter would grow up to be just as plain and ordinary in appearance as her father - loose, brown curls for hair and a very slim face. She would have her mother's eyes though and those were quite beautiful. Perhaps, that is what Emmett might have been referring to, but at the moment, her delicate eyelids were shut.

"Ish-tia-nay?" Nitis asked.

Earnest looked to his wife for help, but she seemed just as lost as he was. "Um…her name is Lee. If that's what you're asking."

Nitis frowned. "Ish-tia-nay-dah?"

"She's nearly a year old now." Norma Gene answered this time, not wanting to seem rude.

Nitis still frowned and leaned over the small, sleeping thing. It was so frail, so tiny that he chuckled and muttered something to himself. He had always liked children and this had to be the strangest one he had ever seen.

Emmett still didn't understand what he had said, but he did catch onto one phrase, "Ish-kay-nay" and didn't think much of it.

The language barrier would be a hard thing to get past, but eventually, Nitis would learn how to speak their language and live in their world. Even so, the Harpers never bothered to ask what he had said about their daughter the day they met. But if they ever had the sense to ask, they would know that Nitis first asked if the baby was a girl. And that when he received an answer he did not understand he came to the conclusion that Lee Harper was, in fact, an "ish-kay-nay" or as an English-speaking person would call it, a boy – and a feminine one at that.

Lee tucked her hands into the pockets of her blazer to keep them warm. She had been waiting for some time, but she was sure she wouldn't have to wait much longer. Today's broadcast was nearing its close.

From across the street, she could see Cecil sitting in his booth, speaking into the microphone. It was the only light on the whole street. This may have been due to the fact that someone had discretely painted over each streetlamp bulb with black paint. Lee guessed the Sheriff's Secret Police had something to do with it. Black was there favorite color after all.

The scene was Cecil in a nutshell. A man, sitting in the middle of darkness with only that small box full of light to comfort him.

She hadn't seen him in a while, but she felt all the familiar aches when she stood there, looking at him and waiting for him to step out of the studio. He was very real. There is never any fiction when it comes to feelings. This man was capable of making her incredibly happy as well as inflicting the worst pain without knowing it.

Cecil said his goodnights and pressed a few buttons on the sound board. After he locked up, he turned around and saw Lee standing across the street.

At first, he shook his head, as though he was trying to shake her from his imagination, but Lee managed a wave and he waved back.

"Were you waiting for me?" he called to her.

She nodded.

Cecil smiled and crossed the street, briefcase swinging heavily in his hand. He had his shoulders up as he shrugged against the cold. "And to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Well…I heard what you said…on the radio…" Lee began.

"Oh! A listener." he chimed.

Her heart felt like a crumpled wad of paper with her mind screaming at her about all the other times before and how this would be no different. But even if he did forget like all the other times, it felt right to tell him. And at least in this moment, he noticed her.

"I just wanted to let you know that…you are real. You do exist."

Cecil was still smiling, only now with sadness in his eyes. "Well, I wouldn't know about that."

"But I can see you. I listen to you on the radio every day." she argued.

"You could very well be a figment of my imagination. You and everyone else in this town." he pointed out.

She sighed and rolled her eyes at him. Even she was surprised at the amount of attitude she was showing him. "Take it from a girl who knows. Not existing has a lot less love and a lot less friends. You have both of those."

Cecil had raised his eyebrows at her, but then they sank back down as he carefully measured her words with a bit of a nod.

"Thank you." said Cecil, clearly warmed at the heart. "That's actually…that's really nice."

"I just thought you should know." she shrugged. "I'll see you around, I guess."

"Wait." he stopped her. "I didn't catch your name."

"Lee." she said to him for what had to be the hundredth time. "Lee Harper."

"Cecil." he beamed, sticking out his free hand.

Lee shook it with little vigor and returned her hand to her pocket. She turned to walk home again, but Cecil had stopped her once more.

"Hey, would you mind walking with me for a while? My apartment's a little ways from here so I understand if you don't want to, but I could use the company. Walking by yourself in the dark can be so boring." he asked hopefully.

Lee's mind objected fiercely against this, but she still answered, "Yeah, sure." in her usual mumble.

Beaming with gratitude, Cecil ushered her alongside him and they began to walk.

"How come you just didn't drive? You have a car don't you?" Lee asked.

"I do, but sometimes I have to walk. The parking lot behind the station is nearly full from all the cars left behind – past interns, you know."

"Oh."

"The spot just opened up today if you're interested."

"I think I'll pass."

So, in the dark they walked, talked, listened and laughed. And even though Lee knew he'd remember none of this tomorrow, she couldn't help but enjoy herself.

It was always different, hearing him in person. He never talked about the same things over and over. It was always different. His eyes would light up. He'd make faces and wave his hands around. It was a joy to see him like this. And even more than before now that he talked about the wonderful, perfect Carlos with his face completely rosy and his voice so close to a squeak.

It was what she always did to feel better – listening to Cecil's voice. There was nothing else in the world and she didn't mind so much right now. The Tracker was gone, but he'd come back. This was enough for now. She needed this, even if it was just for one night.