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  Transfixed, Tristan accepts the drawing stick she extends to him, and she nods at the dirt between them, indicating that he should relay his message. Remembering with a surge of desperation that he hasn’t bowed in the princess’s presence, so struck is he by her appearance, he now bows deeply with a forward jerk. The motion is too violent. The chestnut was once large enough to fit snugly into the hollow at the top of his head, but the shriveled husk it has become is dislodged, and rolls to Isolde’s tiny feet. It is a withered, cracked thing; pathetic. Tristan is mortified.

  But before he can act, the princess herself stoops to retrieve his chestnut. Straightening with it in her tiny pink hands as though it were an infant, she draws very close to the messenger, and reaches up to his head to reinsert the prickly globe. Her nearness intoxicates him, and his mind is blanked, particularly from having been so intimately handled by her. But now he is dismayed, because the princess withdraws her hands sharply. He sees why: a thorn from the ball has broken off and just barely penetrated the rubbery skin of her right hand.

  Tristan reaches out and takes her hand between his to steady it, and then he pinches the root of the prickle delicately between his scissored wrists, not having fingers to articulate. He dislodges the thorn, then looks into Isolde’s close, upturned face.

  For a delirious, teetering moment Tristan feels beneath his feet the spiraling of the galaxy of which he is a part. And then, he realizes, the princess is smitten with him as well. It is unthinkable, but plain in her expressionlessly yearning countenance. Emboldened by her power, and by her desire, she reaches out to him. She must know that he will not dare take the initiative. Watching those pink hands with their fused fingers glide toward him, Tristan feels his head start to twitch and quiver so rapidly that it nearly blurs his grinning features.

  Act Four: Turn Away, Children

  As he fantasized, the pink hands float to his face, but they are shaken off by its vibrations, so they descend to his body instead, which only makes his head blur the more. The lower front of his black garments tents out in a point. A pink hand rubs in little circles over this straining hard point, and against the cloth the point opens into a little mouth that nips at her hand passionately with serrated teeth.

  A hard point tents out of her own dress. Its bright tip pierces the gauzy muslin. Like a hungry steel bird beak, the tip yawns open. It is a pair of fingernail scissors, the ringed handles forming the princess’s lovely pelvis. These hooped hips are worked by rubber bands and levered segments of her musculature. The curved blades, thus, cut through his black garb, releasing his nipping point. It is, once revealed, a pair of tweezers which now extends further from his groin. With them, Tristan takes hold of one of the pink hands, and squeezes it just enough for the teeth to impress her rubbery skin. He can feel the tremor of pleasure radiate through her frame.

  She scissors away more of his clothing until it falls from him in rags, baring his intricate exoskeleton jointed like an artist’s mannikin. With his tweezered protrusion, he pulls at her dress, dragging it away from her body, so that it tears against her sharp points. Her beauty is further revealed, like a butterfly with its cocoon cut away: the rustless steel rods of her arms, so smooth when he runs his fingerless mitts along their surfaces. The warm, vaguely rough textures of her wooden thighs, this wood not warped and worm-eaten because she is the princess and wondrously made. And her torso, praise creation, is primarily formed by a small glass perfume bottle, deep dark blue, inverted so that the cap points downward, which he imagines still has a little of its residue sealed inside its smooth interior.

  They draw closer yet, so that his tweezers skitter against the blue glass, pointing upwards as the instrument is sandwiched between them. Likewise her scissors. He grips the scissors with his tweezers and the scissors clench his organ back, so that they are locked fiercely. He runs his mitts along her sides, deliciously feeling their glossy sleekness, and he shudders in ecstacy as he feels some raised lettering on the bottle ripple across his palms.

  Isolde pulls Tristan down on top of her on the floor of her chamber. Their limbs trace patterns of indecipherable pleasure in the dirt where he was to have told her that his uncle, King Mark, sent him on his behalf.

  Propped above her reclining form, that glowing pale face gazing up at him with puckered cherub lips of red enamel, Tristan unscrews with his tweezers the blue bottle’s cap where it lies between her legs. He was correct: a trace of its hidden fragrant juices drips free, and he can imagine its vertiginous scent …as he slips his now glistening tweezers into this inviting threaded hole.

  In and out he slides, so deeply that the tweezers nearly become wedged in the opening time and again, the metal grating with a soft screech against the glass lips. Her scissors snap at the air between them as if clicking out a language of passion.

  Suddenly, there is another sound behind them. An angry scratching noise, and their heads swivel around to look. Figures draw furiously in the dirt, or wave and clack their frenzied limbs. They have been found out, the princess and the lowly nephew of King Mark, who has sent him here on a trusted errand. Tristan has betrayed his King and disgraced this princess. The lovers reluctantly and shamefully withdraw from their embrace.

  Tristan knows that he can not return to his uncle, nor can he remain here. He reads the dirt writing, so emphatic that it churns up a mist of dust. He is to be exiled; banished off to the third palace within the kingdom of the discarded.

  Act Five: The White Hand

  Tristan treks to the rear of the kingdom, where the great rusted fence looks upon the back of an automotive garage from which come roars and hisses, metallic whines and shrieks, as from a haunted mountain…as if that garage contains the gnashing clockwork of the universe.

  The palace is largely contained within the tank and bowl of a toilet heavily half sunk in the compost of dead leaves, and covered with branches. In the great white dome of the bowl, Tristan has an audience with the Duke, and his daughter, Iseult of the White Hand.

  Her hands are indeed white; they are of snowy porcelain. Tristan realizes that they might in fact be the hands that should go along with the face of his beloved Isolde. Also, Isolde seems to possess the warm pink hands that should belong to this lady’s face. For her small head is that of a smiling teenage girl with blue eye shadow and long hair so blond it is almost white, though much of this is torn out leaving a peppering of black holes. Her gown is black like Tristan’s new garments. She comes to greet him, and she towers over him on her long rubbery legs, her body fairly intact except that her arms have been replaced with articulated limbs ending in those cool glassy hands, one of which Tristan touches to his grinning jester mouth as he bows to his new hosts and benefactors.

  When he rises, he sees Iseult smiling down at him with perfectly painted white teeth. He realizes that she is attracted to him. Once, he might have hungered to touch her warm rubber legs with their bendable wire cores, and to see naked the harder plastic shell of her torso, but he can only think of the exquisite white face of his lover, of her flowered nest of hair and her blue glass depths.

  In the days that follow, the princess Iseult’s attraction to him becomes increasingly apparent to Tristan, until one day she surprises him at the doorway to his own humble chamber. She steps inside on her dainty arched feet, which lack the minuscule high-heeled plastic shoes they are contorted to fit. Nervously, Tristan notes that one of her ankles is split so that he can see the flexible wire inside her resilient flesh. It is as though he has glimpsed her actual essence, that of a cool gray worm masquerading in a soft pink body.

  After sliding back into place the warped Christmas card, heavy with foil and embossing, that serves as his door panel, Iseult swivels her bright smile toward him. As mild as it is, the smile nonetheless appears to him as a carnal leer filling the world, hatefully eclipsing the pursed dainty lips of his true love. He has to take his gaze from her, and looks past her at his door. The Christmas card shows a gorgeous angel, but it is inverted, so that sh
e seems to be plunging head-first toward the floor, fallen from the heavens of ink and glitter.

  The princess puts her white porcelain hands on him. He resents their temptation, their seduction, their mocking resemblance to Isolde’s white face; he hates her for those beautiful hands, as if she has hacked and stolen them from his love. Furthermore, he hates himself, as he begins to become aroused by the princess’s roving caresses.

  The white hands free his tweezers from his black garments, and the steel instrument thrusts to its full length under her deft ministrations. The glassy hands skitter and slide up and down his polished tool until inadvertently he begins to nip hungrily at them. Her own mounting lust is made evident by the lengthening of her nipples as they press out the fabric of her garb. The princess further makes known her pleasure by reaching up to part those ebony garments, allowing them to fall away, her body fully revealed to him.

  He sees her nipples are still lengthening in corkscrew twists, their metal ends sharp points, and he realizes she has two long screws inserted into her back so that their tips protrude through her front. Some marvelous mechanism inside her hollow torso, or perhaps her powerful will alone, commands their movement.

  Princess Iseult puts her white palms upon Tristan’s cheeks, and draws his face down to those nipples, which have reached their fullness at last. He wonders if she means to drill one of them into his face, making him a true orifice for a mouth. Or does she mean to stab them into his eyes, to obliterate Isolde forever from his gaze, leaving only hollow blackness such as resides within her own being?

  But she pulls his head down lower, and it isn’t into his face that she plunges the sharp points, but his mummified chestnut brain. The screws have not reached their limit after all, as they begin to turn anew, skewering him deeper…deeper. But he doesn’t fight against her. How can he? He submits, bent to her as if bowing to her, submissive and surrendering, miserable and yet still aching with lust, as Iseult of the White Hand penetrates his mind. They both shudder then, convulse, one spasming body, as they reach their climax.

  It is not much longer before Tristan has bowed, surrendered fatalistically, yet again. He and Iseult are married.

  Act Six: Wounded

  Spring has come and turned feverishly lush, becoming summer, and the kingdom is crowded to its borders with life and fertility. Even now, servants are assembling a first child for Tristan and Iseult. And yet, this brings him no joy. He has been abject, as if mourning a death, ever since learning that his uncle King Mark has married the princess Isolde.

  One day, he reluctantly accompanies his father-in-law the Duke and others on a hunt. Anything to get away from the tiresome ecstasies of his bride. For when she is not brow-drilling him, raping his already mutilated brain, whose thorns can not compete with her steely teats, she is brow-beating him, accusing him, mocking him. She is well aware of the reason he was banished from his own palace. Fully aware of his crime. And she has noted how much more glum he has become since learning of the marriage of Isolde. Iseult is jealous, contemptuous …but determined to be the one who owns him. Her lust for him is a triumphant ritual of dominance. It is as though he is a prize she has won from the other princess in a war of passion. He can’t imagine that his wife loves him any more than he does her.

  The hunt takes place at twilight, when the larger and more challenging animals of the kingdom begin to venture forth on their own hunts. Tonight the musk of skunk is heavy on the thick summer air. But it is an opossum they encounter, and which they surround and lunge at with their weapons. The Duke lets his fellows make the first lunges, so that the great white beast will be adequately wounded before he administers the final thrust with his darning needle.

  But the opossum fights wildly, its fleshy tail whipping across the Duke and several others, scattering their light bodies. With various needles and nails hanging from its bleeding flanks, the animal rages away from its tormentors by charging directly at Tristan.

  A long sharp splinter of wood has been lashed to both his wrists with twine, so that he might use it as a spear, but he has not thought to really take part in the killing tonight. Thus, it does not even occur to him to raise his weapon until it is too late. Maddened by its pain and frenzied with fear, the ghost-like animal seizes Tristan in its jaws and front paws and begins savaging him madly.

  His new black garments are shredded, tattered by sharp fangs and claws. An arm is ripped from him. His tweezers drop from his loins to the forest floor. And his withered chestnut brain is dislodged, rolls away into the dense vegetation and is lost from sight.

  The Duke and the others have righted themselves, and attack the briefly preoccupied beast from behind. It releases its struggling prey but rolls upon his body, trampling and crushing it, while it thrashes horribly in its protracted death throes, the Duke’s long aluminum lance deeply embedded in its side. But as its spasms grow less violent, become more like a diminishing succession of electrified jolts, the others are able to get close enough to Tristan to pull his ravaged body clear.

  They all know, him most of all, that his wounds are mortal.

  He is lifted so that he might be borne back to the palace. He is too weak to ask them to remain and locate the lost chestnut.

  Act Seven: The White Flag

  The blood of the opossum is painted on Tristan’s pallid face, his head propped up so that blood can be poured into it like a bowl, but these efforts only prolong the inevitable. He is dying, and this knowledge frees him; he becomes bold. By feebly scratching in the dirt, he tells his servant to summon to his death bed Isolde the Beautiful, wife of his uncle King Mark.

  If it is her intention to come, she is to send the messenger back to Tristan bearing a white flag in his arms. If she will not come to his side, the servant is to return carrying a flag of black. Then he will know whether or not to cling to these last shreds of life.

  Tristan may be dying, and thus emboldened, but the servant is not nearly so free. Afraid to comply with Tristan’s wishes behind his wife’s back, the servant makes known to Iseult the final request of her husband.

  Iseult is enraged, but her rage burns cold even in this summer swelter.

  Wildly waving two leafy twigs in a kind of semaphore, she commands the servant to fashion a flag of black.

  After waiting a suitable amount of time, so that it will seem he has indeed traveled to the far palace of King Mark, the servant enters the bed chamber of Tristan carrying a stick to which has been tied a scrap of black plastic trash bag. The servant stands at the foot of the cigar box bed nervously, as if awaiting Tristan’s next command.

  But there is no final command. Tristan simply lowers his head back. His eyes are still bright in his cracked, blood-caked white face, and his lips are still curled in a great smile, but his soul rolls out of him as his desiccated brain has already rolled out of him. As the chestnut became lost amongst the rich flora of the kingdom, so his soul vanishes into a greater, invisible kingdom to which only spirit, not matter, is discarded.

  It is as if a hand has been withdrawn from inside a puppet. Tristan is no longer a prince, in his dismembered state not even a doll. And yet despite this, he is loved. Despite his wife’s betrayal, word of his death reaches the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

  Act Eight: Inanimated

  Though both King Mark and Iseult protest, Isolde insists that she must go to the side of her fallen, former lover. She can not be dissuaded or denied. Reluctantly, the King accompanies her, as he feels obligated to pay his respects to his disrespectful nephew. But when they arrive at the impressive toilet-palace of the Duke, King Mark allows his wife to first go to Tristan’s side alone. He is heart-broken by Isolde’s greater love for his nephew, but loves her enough to grant her this private mourning.

  Even the servant beside the bed leaves her alone with her suffering and the still form of her lover, lying in a cigar box packed with layers of leaves and plastic bubble wrap (it was one of Iseult’s pleasures to make love with him upon this material so that it
popped beneath them). Isolde nearly swoons at the sight of him. The unabsorbed animal blood crusted to his grinning handsome face. And that poor, empty, empty skull…

  She kneels at his side, gently stroking his cheek with her pink plastic hand, recalling how his face vibrated in nervousness the first time she touched him thus.

  She will never love her great husband as she loved this humble being.

  Since learning of his demise, Isolde the Beautiful has been secretly planning to dismantle herself violently by using her scissored sex organs and her lover’s tweezers, so that she might join him in death, if such a thing is possible, or cast herself into oblivion to escape her torment if it is not…but she finds his gleaming tool has been torn away.

  No matter. She is strong. She is a princess. Her will is powerful. She knows she needs no weapon, ultimately, to achieve her aim.

  Rising from her kneeling position, she lies down inside the cigar box, upon the very body of her lover, and slowly withdraws her existence. Unwills the animation of these gathered scraps of pretty junk. Her lovely blue glass torso becomes an empty perfume bottle. Her porcelain head like that of a marionette with its strings cut by its own hand.

  They are found that way. They are remembered that way. There are a few who resent them, betrayed by them. But for most of those who dwell in the three palaces of the kingdom, they become legend. Their love inspires. It lives on in the bodies of the inspired. It lives on without vessels to carry it, as a fable and an ideal.

  Their parts are not reused, recycled. They are not buried together, but they are both buried. And part of the legend that survives like a thing that can not be killed is this: that even now, those buried pieces are reanimating themselves under the soil, the leaves. He, finding new pieces in that soil to complete his sundered body. Even now, so it is told, they are working their way toward each other through the very flesh of the kingdom. Slowly, arduously, crossing the great distance between their respective palaces. It may take years. It may take until those greater beings who live beyond the rusted fence have themselves all passed into the earth.