A scene from the throne room

The court owns one shelf, one folding chair, one bucket, a former tray now called a plate, and one dead thing in the garden — the total in the treasury stands at precisely nothing dollars and nothing cents. The throne-credits I have filed beside the fifteen-dollar deposit, in the drawer marked Pending, where money goes to be remembered.

I remove the yacht, I remove the phantom oak, and I remove the forty bars, which by my count leaves the tray, the bucket, the dead plant and a total one item short of where we began. The missing article is signed for as follows: one chair, folding, whereabouts unknown, confiscated into the treasury at three cents a day.