Long Live the King

De: Dell Sweet

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The King is dead, the headlines screamed. A hard, hard day. But, what if the king wasn't dead? What if the king just got fed up with all of it and called it quits...

The quiet cadence of Aaron’s days was rarely broken by external disruptions. His hermitage in the bayou was, by design, an exercise in profound isolation. Yet, the world, like an persistent tide, would occasionally lap at the shores of his self-imposed exile. These intrusions were not of the dramatic, attention-grabbing variety that had once defined his existence. Instead, they arrived as fleeting whispers, carried on the humid air or snagged by the errant radio waves that sometimes pierced the dense foliage surrounding his cabin. These were the stray threads of the outside world, remnants of a life he had meticulously shed, and they served only to reinforce the wisdom of his seclusion.
One such ripple came in the form of Silas, a taciturn fisherman whose weathered boat occasionally cut a silent swathe through the bayou’s glassy surface. Silas was a man of few words, his face a roadmap of sun-baked wrinkles, his eyes as deep and knowing as the water he navigated. He would sometimes moor his skiff near Aaron’s humble dwelling, drawn by the faint tendrils of woodsmoke or the sight of a figure tending his small garden. Their interactions were sparse, governed by the unspoken understanding of two solitary souls. Silas rarely asked questions, and Aaron offered no voluntary disclosures. Yet, on a particularly still afternoon, as Silas was mending a net, he’d casually mentioned a fragment of news, delivered with the same detached tone he might use to comment on the weather. “Saw somethin’ on the news the other day,” he’d grunted, his fingers working with practiced efficiency. “New fella singin’. Real loud, they say. Name of… can’t recall. Some kinda animal, I think. Like a ‘Lionheart’ or somethin’.” Aaron had merely nodded, a faint smile touching his lips. A new singer, a loud one, with a name evoking primal strength. It was a world away from the carefully crafted melodies and meticulously controlled vocalizations that had once been his currency. The image of this ‘Lionheart’ felt as alien to him as a creature from another planet, a testament to how rapidly the landscape of popular music, and indeed popular culture, shifted and evolved.
Another time, a crackling radio broadcast, picked up by chance on a day when Aaron had been tinkering with an old portable receiver, offered a fleeting glimpse into the relentless churn of celebrity gossip. The tinny voice, struggling against static, spoke of a tabloid scandal involving a beloved actress and a controversial politician, followed by an announcement of a new, viral dance craze that had swept across social media platforms. Aaron listened for a few moments, the disjointed narratives painting a bizarre, almost comical, picture of a world obsessed with fleeting notoriety and ephemeral trends. The sheer speed at which these cultural phenomena seemed to ignite and then vanish left him with a sense of profound disorientation. What was ‘social media’? What was a ‘viral dance craze’? The terms themselves felt like they belonged to a foreign language, a code for a reality he no longer inhabited. He found himself unable to conjure any genuine interest, the intricate machinations of this distant world feeling utterly inconsequential against the backdrop of the bayou’s ancient rhythms.
These accidental encounters with the outside world were like observing a distant storm through a well-fortified window. He could see the lightning flash, hear the faint rumble of thunder, but the rain, the wind, the raw power of it all, remained safely beyond his reach.