Honey is Sweeter than Blood (3 page)

…out of this dimension, back into another.  Back behind the monitor’s glass.  Back behind the TV’s screen.  Back onto the glossy magazine page.  Back into pixel, into ink, into brush strokes on a painting.  Back to the desert dream plain.

Justin slipped into his bathrobe.  He picked up the black nets she had worn over her head, her hands and feet, folded them neatly away into a drawer.  His face expressionless.  No tears.  He drifted wraith-like into his livingroom and seated himself before his computer.

As was his habit, he spun the mouse in five clockwise rotations on his mouse pad while he waited for his computer to boot up.

He started his Photoshop program.  Pulled into it his photo of the pretty blond woman smiling into the camera, fully naked, a torso with the barest nubs for limbs.

Using the art program’s airbrush and cloning features, he was able to quite convincingly remove the woman’s head completely.

A Puppet Show For No Oneor, The Story of Tristan and Isolde

Act One: The Discarded Kingdom

The borders of the kingdom are the borders of the galaxy, and the universe beyond is a hugeness of steel giants that hurtle past in gleaming streams by day, and by night they are fewer but their unblinking eyes blaze light like twin comets, and each giant is larger than the palace of Isolde the Beautiful.

The kingdom is contained by a web of rust that stretches high into the heavens, its links interlaced with bushes and branches, vines and seed pods, rattling brown in winter like the hands of dead infants groping through a cemetery fence.  The many trees imprisoned within this enclosure soar even higher, and help to obscure the kingdom from the world beyond the rusted web.  This plot of land has been thus portioned off for decades, and the people of the town outside do not know or even question who owns it.  Perhaps it is part of the land owned by an old mill next door which was at one time converted into a plastic molding company but has since been divided into smaller spaces for offices, a print shop and a shoe store.  One could easily fit a twin of the old brick mill into this fenced-off strip of land, but nothing has ever been built here.  Not by the people of the outer town, in any case, who walk or bicycle or drive past every day, tossing over the fence a discarded coffee cup or gum wrapper, soda can, full bag of trash.  Their parents and grandparents might have thrown their refuse over that fence, sending it thumping and tumbling into another realm silently and secretly conterminous with their own.  Of course they suspect that there is furtive life down in that hollowed spot, which dips below street level like a foundation into which no building was ever socketed, but they do not fathom its nature.  If they were to pause to imagine it at all, which they do not, their speculations would end at the squirrels and birds and many insects which do indeed thrive within the apparently vacant lot, but which do not represent its only citizens.

Act Two: The Spiked Brain

Tristan raises his face from where it was pressed for many hours into the dry dirt beneath the strata of dead and decaying leaves; it will be easier to soak traces of life-giving chemicals or oil into his pores when spring returns and the earth gets damp and spongy.  He jerks himself to his feet, his movements quick and bird-like, darting looks around him at the graying dusk as he becomes active once again.  His head is that of a very old jester doll with its stuffed cloth body long rotted away; even his bifurcated belled hat and the cottony inside of his skull are gone, leaving a hollow into which he once inserted a plump and thorny green chestnut which has since gone brown as a sea urchin.  His skin is cracked and partially blackened, but his eyes are bright, nose aquiline, his smile brave if his lips are no longer red.  Before he was fully sentient, others made him a body of sticks and small metal bits wired together into articulate joints, and his clothing is black tatters that stream from his arms like lacerated wings.

He is in his tiny chamber hidden within a large heap of dead and fallen branches toward the back corner of the kingdom, and stoops to follow a twisting, scratching passageway through a barbed maze of twigs like brittle, grasping fingers.  The tangle of branches which makes up the palace of King Mark has been fortified and combined with scrap metal and rain-warped cardboard, garbage bag plastic and ceiling tiles, tinfoil and hubcaps, and he passes other rooms and even tunnels that descend into subterranean levels before he enters the throne room of the King.

King Mark sits on a block of wood from which nails protrude, his hands resting on green glass telephone pole transformers.  His head is that of a military doll with realistic hair and beard which have been shaped with rusty razors so that he has an intellectual receding hairline and neat goatee.  He has a plastic scar on his cheek.  Most of his original body is intact, though his feet are missing and he walks by spearing his stumps into the soil.

Jerkily and silently, Tristan approaches the King and bows.  When he rises, the King’s assistant, who has a spindly scarecrow body like Tristan’s but without a covering of clothing, and whose head is the denuded skull of a squirrel, traces intricate lines and patterns into the dirt floor while the King’s arms wave and thrash and clack against each other in a complex sign language.  Tristan nods in understanding.  He is to cross the kingdom, and go to the far-flung palace of Isolde the Beautiful at its further edge.  There, he is to make known to the beauty the love of the King, and Tristan is to bring her back here.

Bowing again, Tristan is dismissed, and makes his way through the thorny palace so as to exit it and venture into the evening, which blackens as if the very air mildews.

Act Three: The Beautiful

No animals attack Tristan along his journey (one time he was savaged by a raccoon, but he was rescued by comrades who speared it, and afterwards they all lay in its blood to soak it into their pores).  He hunkers down sometimes when the steel giants pass the rusted fence, their lights weaving and plunging through the massive tree trunks around him.  The air roars with their passage, as if they are planets racing by.  He picks his way like a scrabbling insect over branches and through matted leaves, flicking his head with its unmoving eyes this way and that.

At last, looming before him is another palace of debris and detritus, flotsam and jetsam, discard and decay.  He crouches through the entrance of the palace, and is stopped by twin guards who are connected by red and green wires running from two halves of the opened and dissected transistor radio which composes their torsos.  He is admitted, and allowed to duck under their conjoining wires so as to proceed into the heart of the woven nest.

A loping guide that is a shed cicada husk lashed to three plastic drinking straws for stilt-like legs leads Tristan through halls of soggy cardboard across which whisk millipedes and silverfish.  They pass an open nursery in which infants sleep in beds fashioned from styrofoam hamburger containers, stuffed with leaves, twine and cotton.  A curious head pops up from one of these nests; it is a red Christmas bulb tapered like the glans of a penis, which turns to watch the pair go by.

The guide leaves Tristan at the outside of the chamber of the princess Isolde.  She swivels her head to face him as he enters.

She is, as they have heard in his palace, beautiful.  Her head is that of a small porcelain doll with delicately painted eyes and lips, most of the paint still intact though her pure glossy skin is spider-webbed with fine cracks.  Her hair is a weave of dried flowers, white cotton, and delicate twigs blended into a poignant bouquet.  Her finely-formed and articulated body of metal, wood and smooth glass is hinted at through the ragged white muslin that enshrouds it.  Her hands are of pink plastic from a less ancient doll, and Tristan aches at their dainty loveliness, instantly imagines them caressing his jutting crescent moon of a face.

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 she 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.