Elena Malkov
King of the City

The air purpled with dusk and blossoming trees. Cicadas whirred in the branches, their husks pockmarking the sidewalk. Lanky, stooped, trying desperately to walk with maximum efficiency but lacking the grace to do so, B. rushed towards the home of his dear friend, who had left an odd voice message on B.’s phone.
“[inaudible] I’ve lost my [inaudible] back!” He repeated the phrase several times, but it kept sounding different, as if he was still formulating what he wanted to convey. B. tried calling back, but his fingers kept slipping off the numbers or pressing them for too long, so he decided to just go see for himself.
The friend, R., lived in a large crumbling mansion on a corner lot. Its sickly peach paint was peeling as usual from the summer heat, but now the coming night elongated its shadows, stretching the façade into a livid grin of darkness. Inside the front hall, lights glowed in their sconces, but dimmer than usual, a thick dusty orange.
B. tried walking room to room, searching for his friend, but it seemed to him he kept coming into the same one over and over, so he would back out, walk down the hall again, enter again⎯and appear right where he started. This happened several times until he walked farther down the hall, entered a room that was definitely not the same room, but was full of people having a party. When B. arrived, they all turned to him with indulgent pleasure pouring off their faces and yelled, not in unison, “We love the King of the City!”
R. wasn’t in this room, so B. backed out again, this time crossing the hall and opening a door on the other side. In a small closet lay a cot covered with bright quilts and the body of R., which was, to be sure, missing its back. The rest of him seemed a little embarrassed but mostly in good spirits. He was eager to tell B. how it all happened.