The Crying King

by Anthony Manganaro 

I emerged in the great hall to see the giant baby – who we called “the king” – just bawling as his bowling ball head bounced up and down. His hat – a kind of tubular saucer – clanked to the ground and spun a few whirls. 
“Shucks,” said Luther to my left (the other guard). He stomped his rod a few times to appear serious – a bit of a character flaw. 
“What do we do now?” I asked Luther, since he was my elder. I was, in fact, being trained this week, and looked forward to protecting the king through a series of acrobatic exercises. 
He eyeballed me and grasped his rod tighter, his fingers beading with sweat. “Just keep quiet.” 
The big baby – who was, in fact, a grown man, though looks suggested otherwise – quit his whimpering and stared at me with watery, heartfelt eyes. Each eye was bigger than my head, it felt like. Then he began talking, executing his reason for existence: the recitation of our civilization’s history, in as truthful a manner as possible. 
For he spoke of platitudes far and wide – familiar tales of ConeLand known to every valley elder. These weren’t new stories, mind you, but tales with extra quirks and jazzed-up detail – in sum, they were beautiful, rhyming, and funny. At certain moments, they even made me chuckle. 
Luther didn’t like that. He asked me to stop, nudging me with his rod. 
And I did, but not without forgetting the king’s central tale, a retelling of Paragor’s Weakness, our “origin story,” as it were. For Paragor was our central deity, a character of 1,226 statues who erected ConeLand’s “True Temples” five centuries ago; what was unusual about the king’s retelling was the omission of mashed potatoes, a glaring move that signified an entirely different history of our land. 
Luther didn’t understand – he rarely did. After consoling said king with kleenexes, we walked home across grassy pastures while I, in falsetto voices, retold the king’s retelling. In those days I loved bounding across hills, singing and jumping with friends and colleagues alike. But on this foggy evening, as the sun set ominously, I told Luther that “with a changed understanding of history, my friend, there will be war in our future – and sooner than you’d think.”  
“Funny,” he said, with a blank, deadpan energy. He sniffed the air. He rarely struck me as intelligent, this Luther. 
So I rid myself of this moron, not that day but forever, running across 16 cow fields and towards my cylindrical hut, a wonderful place to spice meat and be eternally lonely. In the coming hours I’d do something fascinating: rewrite the entire history of ConeLand on 13 scrolls of cracky-paper, scribbling like a mad artist or psychotic marathoner (whatever metaphor hits you best). I wrote of the failing wheat wars and the second potsticker revolution; of our constructions of windmills and our manufacturings of kites; but mostly, I wrote of Paragor: Paragor the sickly child who beheaded three guards en route to the initial conquering of Faenleven; Paragor who commanded teenage armies past the outer crests of blue-hills-yonder; and Paragor who, most crucially, might have – according to the crying king’s recent words – invented the mashed-potato-machine to revolutionize ConeLand’s productive eating habits. For without the machine, according to all our histories, we would’ve starved five times over for lack of effective packaging; with it, food could be flung in rectangular boxes to vast swaths of territory and with blazing speed. This was known: the obvious history of our founding. What wasn’t – what the king just made abundantly clear – was the manner in which it occurred. To quote: 
“Paragor–” (a blubbery wail) “had in fact–” (another) “refused–” (wah!) “the packaging revolution.”
Huge deal, you may surmise, and with irritating sarcasm (who cares who invented the damn machine five centuries ago?) But it was, and here’s why: for Paragor was our demon, our God, and our founder in one perfect legendary package; he was the sun, the wheat, and “the reason the cock crows.” Paragor explained dewy dawns and rationalized boiling water; he gave sustenance to every scintillating ‘morrow and every evening roast. And so, to know this chap actively vetoed the packaging revolution that fed hundreds of families in outer territories to begin the Great Consolidation, indeed that expanded our zone into a territory of song & dance for centuries on end, bulking ConeLand into an unconquerable menace until the present day, was, um … terrifying, to say the least. At least to my mind. 
And so I decided, young buck that I was, to quit “guard training” and march to the librarians, those men with tin hats who held ConeLand to its proper standard. I needed to question this logic, to poke at our history, for the crying king never lied – the reason for his elevation to royalty in the first place.
Knock, knock, knock. (The big doors of the library-castle.) It was raining and my matted hair was getting slick and slimy. In previous years, I liked the rain; now, I barely noticed it. 
A guard opened, grinning angrily at me. 
“I have news,” I announced. “News that’ll change the future trajectory of Cone–”
The door slammed in my face. 
So I ran to the source himself, big baby king, and even along muddy roads. Past 18 windmills, 16 saucer-factories, and 145 normal haystacks, straight into the castle’s royalty room which held his towering chair. He sat, our fat lord, smiling this time and playing with a large doll, poking its eyes out while gleefully cooing. He was a playful king, there was no denying that. And oftentimes happy. 
But this time, the baby got mad. He scowled and squinted. He asked me my name. 
I told him – and reminded him, too, that I was his guard, and not ten hours ago.
“That’s fine,” he squealed. “But my guards don’t speak.”
I winked. “Not until now.”
So I was carried to the dungeons below – tossed like a fish into the most boring room possible. It was so dull, I noticed, sitting up and cracking my knees, that I wished I could fall asleep. And I did, thankfully, dreaming of things happy and sad, of the rich memories of my past. Largely of my childhood, a wistful time praying at Paragor’s festivities. Paragor in the Park (an autumn attraction involving “hacky-sack”). Paragor on Boats (a spring parade, with sailing for all!) Our families ate Paragor Cakes, after all, gorgeous creations that took nine weeks to sculpt and 17 days to clean. There wasn’t just a Paragor course in every curriculum, by god; his philosophies were subsumed into every class, whether mathematics or law! 
And so, I told the first guard who fed me my mush, that, sadly, unfortunately, regrettably, irrevocably… our civilization was, essentially, over. Upon public realization of this damning new history, I explained with non-exaggerated hand gestures, there’d be no more “ConeLand” as it was currently grasped since our legends would crumble into blank nothingness and chaos would undoubtedly erupt. 
He heard me, this one. His name was Duncan – and looked the part of a dunce, with a silly cone hat. 
“Will you swear it in court?” he asked, removing my tray and raising his eyebrow. 
“Will I ever,” I affirmed. And there I stood, not 14 days later, in the roundabout hall encircled by wealthy representatives of ConeLand “proper.” They hounded me, these dedicated readers, about our centuries-old history: librarians barking strange questions at my twittering face and lawyers jumping up and down, rattling me with wonky riddles posed as queries. Until, finally, my words began to seep in and they all started to settle, all started easing back in their chairs and pondering about deep things, staring up at our gorgeously domed ceiling, peppered with old flecks of gorgeous (yet faulty) art...
“A question,” said Fanchetto, standing up (the vice-queen of the outer borders, for she wore multiple robes). “You heard this once from our king, yet haven’t heard it again–”
“This is true,” I stated. 
“ –meaning it’s likelier to be true, based on the law of our land.” (She spoke, of course, of ConeLand’s interior assumption that “repetitive statements” were more likely to be false, based on the logic that singular truths need not, by definition, be repeated.)
“True again.”  
“And,” she said, raising a finger, “knowing the king’s propensity for truthful statements…” – the familiar chorus then rang out from every direction: our beautiful anthem heralding that “kings tell the utmost truth [into B minor], and that’s why they were elected in the first place [brief human wail to conclude]” – before she continued her speech…
“–This creature, then, this little guard here, then” – her head rotated around the roundabout hall – “must be taken seriously, and immediately.” 
She sat down, robes plopping everywhere. 
“Wrong,” stated Bunton, the ugly vice-king who typically monitored pepper-mills. He stood on his old, creaky legs, a widely disliked figure. “This guard here is attention-grabbing, attempting to elevate himself to be ‘next king’ based upon false ‘truthful statements.’”
Boos hailed down – not at me, but at him, for this was a forbidden accusation in ConeLand, the claim that somebody lusted after a kingship. For kingship in these days was an un-discussed genre, an invisible text, a thing sought-after-but-not-spoken-of, a thing that “became” following an eminent moment of truth-telling from the future king (a divine moment, if you will). Hence, to accuse somebody of desiring a kingship was – based upon ConeLand’s interior assumption of “projection” – akin to skewering yourself… it was an admittance of guilt, basically. 
And hence he was hanged, this Bunton fool, for fear of revolution, and then I was heralded a sage, cast to the libraries to continue rewriting our stories and assisting our multiple valleys from having future disagreements. For I worked at high salaries in the coming months and then years, continuing to discover the mysteries of our deep past and saving our future. A war passed as predicted after Paragor’s vetoing of the packaging became transparent, and yet it was a muted scuffle – dozens dead instead of hundreds! – and the eras swiftly moved on. In the coming decades the king didn’t change, yet he grew less baby-like, withering into a sadder old man with a thinner head and wrinkly little wrists. Still, if he cried, it triggered a smattering of new truths emanating from his previous deep readings into the literature of our lands. 
For myself, I continued reading 80 books a day, finding it ridiculous (and, eventually, merely amusing) that I’d previously worked as a guard who desired active lifestyles. Singing in the fields, climbing atop windmills – these were things of my silly past but not of my immediate future, for my head remained in the books, deep in the library’s cellars. Words became my reality, every A, T, and Z embedded in my brain, figures making their lined shapes into definitions of how I reinterpreted the world. This boy Luther, I remembered in a sudden random flash, was once a real guard, not a six-letter word lost in the books! One afternoon I stepped into rain without realizing it was storming; my vision was scattered with alphabets of four different languages, the entire legibility of ConeLand’s six-century history buzzing in my brain and affecting my ability to see. 
At some distant point – after greater security in all hectares of grass, after new forms of religions that trumped previous forms of worship, hence decimating most temples and statues, for I had done a lot – “Paragor” became a seven-letter name of comedy, of ancient legend, of children’s bad stories more than literal histories. And the crying king himself – his true name was “David,” by the way – became a sage of more recent memory, one who’d explained our land’s trajectories through more familiar eras. This was after he died, of course, and the next king was announced. They looked around, these 127,843 residents of ConeLand, and could only see me as truth-telling in the extreme, as a person willing to explain the deep past in as precise and rational a vision as possible. So here I sit, not crying but laughing, as I write our iron realities with wooden blocks and scratchy pen-knives. I don’t enjoy myself, because I am laughing constantly, and laughing with relative sadness since I have no pleasures – no reasons to jump or dance or engage in romantic and sporting activities – but this is fine since I continue scribbling and saving our lands.  
Guards come in, and guards come out. I see these little people as old versions of myself – little ants that think of “eating heron” as a pleasurable experience and “playing hacky-sack” as a wondrous, socialized type of pastime. What are they? I wonder. Do they think like bugs? 
Then I get back to my scrolls, busy at work, but not before shaking my rattles and poking at my fun little dolls. They are made of porcelain and yarn, these things. Their eyes and noses pop out, and I can push them back in.

My fiction appears in The Satirist, Saranac Review, and J.J. Outre Review. I’m an Assistant Instructional Professor in the University of Florida’s Writing Program and Assistant Editor at Pacifica Literary Review.