Seven Days in the Kingdom of the Misplacer by Kristina Ten
Associate editor Dacia Price on today’s bonus short-short: The fabulist absurdism Ten creates in this piece gently guides the reader through a series of uncoverings; power structures, identity, and the value of remembering are teased out through playful prose that lulls before it illuminates. This is the kind of short I want to read again and again as each time is better than the last.
Seven Days in the Kingdom of the Misplacer
On my first day in the Kingdom of the Misplacer, the king explains the nuances of Brecht’s alienation effect. He positions it opposite the Aristotelian effect, once the dominant school of thought in theatrical theory. The king went to a prestigious acting academy once upon a time, in a walled-off city known for its liars.
The alienation effect presents familiar situations in unfamiliar ways, so the audience, at a distance, can more critically observe them. The Aristotelian effect prioritizes self-identification, so the audience, relating closely, feels a profound emotional connection. The king misplaces his memory of this exact conversation, which we’ve had already, word for word, a dozen times this morning.
On my second day in the Kingdom of the Misplacer, the king loses his house keys, has to dig up the spare he keeps under the flower pot on the far side of the shark-filled moat. He loses his wallet, his designer transition lenses, the noise-canceling headphones with the gaming mic. The king is, in general, quite forgetful. Says men have a hundred things on their minds, and kings are men to the hundredth power.
I nod, practicing self-identification. Already I want to be closer to him.
On the third day, the king misplaces my luggage. I’m meant to leave that night, the third night, in accordance with centuries-old wisdom about the proper durations of things, but without my luggage, I’m forced to stay. I search the whole castle, but only halfheartedly, while the king explains the nuances of his principles. He is: for lively debate but against war, for building a diverse and equitable crown’s counsel, for the installation of a heated bidet in every single hut in the realm.
The king is one of those progressive types. He is also, it turns out, a relationship anarchist. On my fourth day, he explains the ethics of non-monogamy. On the claw-foot divan in his antechamber, he misplaces his own wife’s name.
If the king misses the queen, sleeping alone in her gilded, tapestried wing, I wouldn’t know it. It must have been an extraordinary academy. The king is a talented actor.
On my fifth day, he says now that I’ll be sticking around, I can call him Tsar if I prefer—or Emperor, Jeonha, Pyeha? If that is, like, more in keeping with the ethnic customs of my people? I can tell he means it kindly. Part of being with a loss-prone king is finding things and offering them graciously to him. On the fifth day, his headphones under the skirts of a lesser duchess. On the sixth, the benefit of the doubt.
Mere subjects can’t hope to identify with their ruler, but they should strive to be more like him. He who is the nearest soul, they say, in all the world to Heavenly God.
By my seventh day in the kingdom, I’m a loyal misplacer, having lost whatever is deemed most essential: my wits, my head, my cool, my virtue, my grip, my bearings, my fool way home.
Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer with work in Lightspeed, Fantasy, Gulf Coast, Split Lip, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. A graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, she is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.
