It wasn't until the day he burst in on the PTA meeting in a panic, shouting about time and unable to formulate a coherent argument AGAINST removing a lead door from an area which claimed to have active plutonium, that he really began to worry about his stress level.

He thought Josie might have noticed too. He suspected that was why she'd asked him to come by the house – it seemed unlikely she actually needed help with yard work, as she claimed, especially with all of her supposed "house guests", but Carlos had a hard time saying no to her.

The first thing Carlos had realized about Josephine Williams was that he liked her, very much. The second was that she frightened him. Rationally, when he saw her tiny form, a bundle of faded floral patterns tottering across her porch on knobbly knees, feet shuffling in her sensible orthopedics, he knew she should have been the least threatening person in Night Vale. And yet, when he looked down into her face to tell her hello in the line at Ralph's, he got a strange sense of vertigo, and found himself looking up at her, feeling small, and shy, and as though he were holding something behind his back that he really, really didn't want her to see but knew, with a sinking feeling in his gut, that she already knew about.

That was how he felt now, walking up to her front porch in late afternoon heat.

"Afternoon, Ms. Josie."

She looked him over from her perch on her avocado colored metal lawn chair, her feet dangling a few inches off the ground. "You made it out, then, hijo?"

He held out his arms, gesturing at himself "I said I would. Are you surprised?" Carlos wondered for a moment if he had misinterpreted the invitation, and his stomach knotted.

Old woman Josie just nodded, slowly, appraisingly. Carlos felt that sense of vertigo coming on, and plunged on, "You said you had some yard work you needed help with…?"

She continued to look him over for an uncomfortable moment, then, finally, she smiled at him. "You're a good boy" she said. "Yes, come over this way, I'll show you."

She toddled slowly off of the chair, and gathered up her cane, and Carlos offered her a hand as she climbed down the steps of the porch. She led him, painfully slowly, over to one side of the house, where about 10 large pots stood, shielded from direct sun by the side of the house. They were filled with soil – Carlos wondered if she was going to want him to plant something. It seemed a bit late to be planting in August.

"It's my arthritis," she told him. "Everything's ready to be picked this week, but here it's gone and flared up, and the scorpions will make short work of these if I don't gather them up soon. I would ask the angels, but they don't take well to it, some kind of allergy, I think."

"What are they?" Carlos asked, feeling like he was missing something obvious.

"A thinly veiled metaphor" she said. Carlos blinked at her.

She reached out to an area about 2 feet above the nearest pot, pinched her fingers together in an "ok" gesture, and twisted her wrist, holding her pointer finger and thumb up for Carlos to see.

"Leshy berries." She explained. "You know the invisible pie they serve down at the All-Nite? It's a local specialty. No?" She said, when Carlos shook his head. "Oh, you really should try it. They make lovely jams, too."

Carlos didn't know how to point out that there was nothing in the pots without being rude, and possibly gravely offensive. Instead he reached out, and experimentally ran his hand back and forth above the nearest one, where they encountered absolutely nothing.

Old woman Josie sighed, and reached up, taking Carlos's hand in her own.

"You young bucks know everything, don't you," she said, sounding exasperated.

She placed her small callused hand on the back of his own, and guided it back over the pot, and Carlos nearly pulled it back in shock, as he felt his fingertips brush glossy, thick leaves.

"You get yourself into trouble trusting your eyes too much around here." She told him. "Some things you have to take on faith, hijo."

The cognitive dissonance of touching something that was actually, truly invisible was more than Carlos had expected. His eyes and his fingers were duking it out for dominance. He blinked, then blinked again, then shook his head.

"It may help if you close your eyes, at least at first," she told him.

And that was how Carlos ended up spending half of his day in the blistering desert sun with his eyes closed, groping through Old Woman Josie's side yard. The invisible berry bushes, as it turned out, had invisible thorns, and by the time he'd worked his way through most of the pots (with Josie shouting occasionally and pointing at the pots with her cane when he missed something) he was filthy, sweating, and bearing a number of nasty looking scrapes.

He carried the fourth and final bucket of berries back up to the porch, where Josie was pouring out a large glass of sun tea. She offered it to him, and he sat down in the metal deck chair next to hers and drank it down in one go.

Carlos took one of the berries and rolled it around it his palm. It was still disorienting to look at it and feel it at the same time, but he was getting more used to it. It was small, and firm, similar in size and shape to a cranberry, but cool to the touch. He wondered if she'd let him take one back to the lab for some testing.

"You haven't tried one yet, have you?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "I figured I shouldn't. Not without asking…they're not poisonous or ...sentient, or anything?"

Josie rolled her eyes, and waved her hand at him. "Go on, then," she said, which, Carlos thought, wasn't actually a no.

He put the berry into his mouth, and closed his eyes, and bit down. It burst onto his tongue – and it tasted like a sunset.

Carlos heard himself sigh, his eyes still closed.

"That's why mine are the best," she said proudly.

Carlos hummed approvingly. He leaned back in the chair, and a gentle breeze kicked up, sending a pleasant chill through his sweat dampened shirt.

"There now," she said. "Feeling better?"

"Better? But I wasn't…" Carlos began, but one glance at Josie let him know she wasn't going to be having any BS today. "Yes." He said. "Yes, a bit better."

"Good." She said. "Because we need to have a little chat about your culture shock. Normally I don't do this – prefer to mind my own business, you know, but…a friend of ours has taken a special interest in you, and the last thing we need is our best scientist wandering off gibbering into the sand wastes, so I want to give you a little piece of advice." She leveled her eyes at him. "You need to calm down."

Carlos sighed. She was right, objectively, but… "I'm honestly not sure I know how."

Josie shook her head. "You need to stop looking at things like somebody who doesn't live in this town." She said. "It's all fine and good that you're running your experiments and helping remove lead hazards, but trying to science your way out of everything will only land you in re-education, or incinerated, or stuck in chronic existential crises like the rest of your little friends. Are you even listening to the radio?"

"A little." He said.

Josie glared at him.

"Okay, no, but…" he stammered, and he wanted to say "I don't understand why the local radio host calls me perfect" or "I'm not entirely sure he's human" or "There is something really sinister going on in that radio station and I'm going to get to the bottom of it" but Josie was making him feel like he was about five years old, and he found himself confessing, "it scares me."

Josie's expression softened, and she reached across to pat his hand where it rested on his knee.

"You're a good boy." She said again, and it held the weight of absolution. "But you need to give this place a chance. And you need to listen to the radio." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, her expression a little too knowing. "Cecil isn't good at subtle, you might have noticed. But he won't hurt you."

"How can you be sure?" Carlos asked.

Josie shrugged. Both of their glasses of tea were full again, but Carlos was sure Josie hadn't refilled them. There wasn't even a pitcher nearby.

"I just know." She took another sip of tea, and the ice rattled lazily in her glass. "His heart is in the right place. I've seen the CT scans."