This is The Author's Voice, New Fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Michael Andresen read his story,

The King's Teacup at Rest from the July 11th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Andresen has published fiction in Zoetrope All's Story and elsewhere.

This is his first story in The New Yorker.

Now here's Michael Andresen.

The King's Teacup at Rest.

Signed, notarized, everything in order.

The royal steward returns the amusement park's deed to his crocodile leather attaché case and addresses the king.

Your Majesty, he says, in his most officious tone, extending a withered hand in the

direction of the failing iron gates. May I present, for your consideration, Liebelings' Sunday morning

carnival and Midway. His Royal Highness, the King of Retired Amusements, surveys the carnival grimly.

Beside him, his modest cortege.

The steward, tall and lengthily wrapped in a livery of black velvet, a powdered wig on his

head, and lace pursed at his collar and wrists, his spectacles at high perch. The scout, not yet

sixteen, pale and freckled in his olive sash and khaki shorts,

and the dancing bear, in a comically small fez and a jacobian rough, precariously balanced on a confetti

speckled ball, an atlas in reverse, his fabulously razored claws never daining to touch the

ground.

Not much, the king says. It is autumn, and the air is beginning to turn. Your Majesty wishes

to forego the inspection. Are you sure you've brought us to the right place? The king asks the

...