The Diceman

by Luke Rheinhart

  Whack ! The belt burst across Osterflood's thighs like a cannon shot. He grunted and turned over onto his stomach.

  Whack ! it came across his buttocks; whack! across the back of his thighs. His powerful body arched in pain and then

  when Gina paused, collapsed trembling.

  I noticed now a bloody gash on Gina's shoulder and blood mixed with saliva was still sliding from her lower lip. She

  looked down at Osterflood and in a single swift terrifying motion slashed the belt across his back. Three or four

  pinkish welt lines were now clearly etched on his body.

  'Ahh,' I said. 'Is this part of the regular show?'

  She stood without answering, breathing deeply, a single line of sweat now running from the side of her neck down in

  between her breasts, which rose and fell moistly.

  'I'm dying, I'm dying,' Osterflood moaned. 'Beat me, please beat me.'

  'You white pig,' she said in a soft voice. 'Fat, man pig.'

  Thock! I absentmindedly took a sip from one of the drinks and spat it out on the rug. Wrong drink.

  A burst of applause flooded into the room and I glanced over to see a pompous little dictator parading down the aisle

  of an auditorium to the applause of formally dressed spics, or chinks, or gooks or greasies.

  'Drink,' I heard a voice say.

  Osterflood had gotten now to his knees and was reaching out an arm toward my tray. His eyes were unfocused and glittering. . - .

  I raised my free hand and Gina took from the tray a glass and handed it to Osterflood and he downed it at a gulp.

  Holding the third drink in my free hand, I sighed. Osterflood had taken the wrong drink.

  While Gina reached down to take another swig from hers, I returned to Sugar Ray and Al Capone and poured two more drinks. I marched back again with my tray of three and stood just beside and behind Gina.

  'You're trying to kill me,' Osterflood said looking up at us from his knees. 'You shit-filled monster, you're trying to kill me:' He was staring at us glassy-eyed.

  Gina looked down at him, her large brown eyes radiant and curious, and for the first time she smiled, slightly.

  'Bad trip?' she asked quietly.

  'I see it all now,' Osterflood shouted at us. 'You're the killer!' He began shaking his head and trembling. 'Now I see, now I see! It's you!' The 'Thock!' that caught him across the face surprised both him and me, and he fell forward with a crash.

  `Yes, yes, whip me, I deserve it,' he groaned. 'Hit me again.'

  Gina looked down at him, the soft smile still on her face, and sweat running now from her forehead, chin and both heaving breasts.

  She raised the belt slowly till her arm was perpendicular above her head and then dropped it in a lazy arc snapping the belt at only half-force across his back. Osterflood writhed nevertheless, and Gina's soft smile became a sneer.

  I put my tray full of drinks on the couch and came over behind Gina, reached my arms around and enclosed at last in my hands those two marvelous mounds. They were hot and sweaty and firm and I grunted with pleasure. As I squeezed and pinched, and sucked at the salty sweat of her neck, I felt Gina lean back again and 'whack' across Osterflood's buttocks, and after a short pause another heaving motion and 'whock!' and Osterflood and I both grunted, although presumably for different reasons. Then Gina turned to me and we were two hot mouths endlessly exploring each other's watery, snake-bulging wombs. Although my hands had removed her leather skirt and were around her bulging buttocks and digging into everything they could, my world was soon composed of mouths, huge caverns of tongue-tangled flow of motion endlessly plunging and being plunged, biting and being bitten, rising and sinking, filling and emptying, and I felt something scratching at my leg.

  'A drink,' Osterflood was saying. 'A drink, you fucking killer. One last drink.'

  Reluctantly, I tore my hands away from Gina and dreamwalked over to the couch and got him the desired drink.

  I straight-lined and she broke her mouth from mine and arched her head away from mine and said shrilly 'Suck me, suck me,' and cupped her breasts out toward me.

  I lowered my open mouth on to one and as I tongued and sucked and nibbled she moaned 'I'm a woman! I'm a woman!'

  'I know, I know,' I said as I moved from one mound of hot, salty honey to the next. She squeezed my head against her.

  'Hard, harder,' she moaned.

  I opened my mouth so wide I was afraid I'd never get it closed again and had a surrealistic vision of going through the rest of my life like a gaping fish and I drew all of 'one breast into my mouth as far as I could while I squeezed her other with both my hands pinching the nipple hard. Groaning, she pressed me tighter, shuddered, and began to pump her pelvis against me hard, and it flowed out of me at last, a molten roll of white womb-wetting foam, her fold opening and closing upon it swallowing with its honeyed tongues, her golden bowls rolling with my roll, filling where I rose, parting with my plunge, delirious, writhing, moaning, groaning done.

  Or mostly done. I un-swallowed her breast and managed to half-close my mouth and drew her warm soft body to mine and we churned at half-speed with each other, still enjoying the feel of it, my chin in her hair now, her lips and tongue idly tasting of the sweat of my chest and Osterflood was talking about dying dying dying and someone else was saying we could get there faster in a Ford.

  We sat there for two or three minutes, Osterflood grunting, his face twisted occasionally into a horrible grin and the canned hilarious laughter blasting out at us from the television set like slop thrown out a tenement window.

  Then I lifted Gina off me and walked over and collapsed into a sprawled sitting position on the couch wondering vaguely what time it was Agatha Christie time and how the great, clean, graceful murder, without fuss, emotion or violence, done with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss was ever going to end. The handsome, silly husband was trying to explain to his pretty, silly wife why it was necessary to tell their teen-age daughter about the facts of life.

  'If I thought it was bees, she can think it is bees,' the woman said and the actors paused to let the machine roar away its bubbled laughter.

  Gina stood again now over Osterflood, the belt still in her hand - she hadn't released it from her hand since her first blow twenty minutes before. Osterflood was on his back, arcing slightly, his feet toward the couch. He was grinning moronically, his eyes bulging and his cock stiff.

  'I never meant to . .'

  he was muttering. `Nice boys nice girls . . . mistake . , . I'm sick, I'm sick . . . dying . . . see that now .. NEVER AGAIN … be a good boy, Mommy, beat me BEAT ME.'

  Gina stepped over him with one leg so she straddled his head and shoulders and faced his feet. She leaned forward a few inches and let a gob of spit fall on to his belly.'

  'Now, Joanie, there's something I must tell you tonight,' the husband was saying.

  'Sure, Dad, but make it quick, Jack's coming with his motorcycle.'

  Gina, smiling a child's soft smile, raised her arm and swept it down thock! the belt tearing across his thighs. Again she raised it fascinating to watch the coil of her wet flesh, semen streaking the inside of her spread thighs, the breasts trembling as she hesitated at the top of the arc - and then whack! across his belly and extended rod. He screamed and vaulted his back, the grin still there, laughter from the television set spitting into the room like froth from a mad dog.

  Osterflood's moans and mumbles were mostly incoherent now, and Gina rose and struck twice more with all her force, he now totally vaulting his back as if raising his stomach and thighs to embrace the hissing belt.

  'Teen-agers today are so violent,' the silly woman said to a silly woman friend as they walked their dogs.

  Gina came back toward the couch, large eyes smiling at me, and took into her warm mouth my now boneless meat and sucked and chewed at it with good appetite. I smiled and stared stupidly at the image of two men on the screen, unearnest, silly men, talking earnestly about the
horsepower of their earnest cars and of drag racing against their son's earnest motorcycles.

  Gina, her head bent back now, breasts trembling, had cupped my balls and buttocks with her hands and was forcing my now bulging, slimy, hot-tipped cock deeper into her mouth, pressing with her hands to force me deeper deeper plunging, a lady sword-swallower arching ever back deep to the throat moaning working me deeper, then out, gasping blowing licking open and down down again swallow whole the great worn weapon of the much beloved foe down #161;fascinating, will my whole body be sucked up into her like a cartoon ghost by a vacuum cleaner? down, her finger now in my anus, then she pulling me out of her mouth breathing me, tonguing me, sliding a long hard kiss along the length of me and then in again deep deeper . . . and up for air.

  She twisted herself on to her back beside me on the couch, spread her legs, and, curving her head back again, directed me back into her mouth and to the base of her throat. The last thing I heard before her slimy thighs closed around my ears was the roar of motorcycles from the screen.

  Gina was awash with semen and sweat and her own love juices and she used my head like a giant penis and pressed at her openings, squeezing with her thighs, writhing for something to enter her, burying me in the silken slime of her cunt until I felt I was drowning and broke myself free. `We did it, we did it!' some male voice was crying from the television screen until the roar of other motorcycles drowned him out. Lowering my lips only to her clitoris I lengthened my hold on her buttocks to ooze my fingers into her rich openings, her cunt like a deep silken pool of the finest lubricants, her other a smooth, tight-fitting glove. I could feel Gina's hand around the base of my prick and occasionally enclosing my balls, and another hand around my buttocks and in my crack and another hand scratching hard at my back and shoulder until I wondered where she got her third hand and suddenly saw five inches from my eyes the twisted horrible grin of Osterflood, eyes bulging.

  `Drink, drink,' he said and clawed at my shoulder.

  I raised myself off Gina and tore my lower half out of her mouth and marched off to the liquor cabinet to get that glass of water. When I marched back again Gina was standing beside Osterflood; he was slumped against the couch. She held out the belt to me as I approached.

  `You want to try a few?' she said.

  `No, no, I'm a pacifist,' I said. `Thanks anyway.'

  She stepped to his back and raised the belt, but I told her to wait until I had given him the glass of water. He turned to me and stretched out a trembly hand for the glass, took it, raised it to his lips and began gulping. Ssssst Thack! The belt tore across the hand and the glass and water spilled to the floor.

  'That wasn't very nice,' I said, wondering if Osterflood were immortal.

  She smiled bright-eyed at me, like a schoolgirl who has just accomplished a particularly good trick with a jump rope.

  `Save me, Rhinehart, save me,' Osterflood mumbled and clawed at my knees. But without Gina's striking him again he abruptly rolled on to the floor and vaulted his back. Gina smiled at him, but he stayed in his vaulted position; he was in another convulsion. As I watch, the belt fell lightly across my hair to my shoulder and Gina looped it so that she had me around the neck with the belt as noose and led me to the chair and forced me down into it.

  She straddled me, lowering herself in little dips against the stiff cock which she maneuvered first against and slightly into one hole and then the other and then she slid over me, burying the cock deep within her. We rubbed now, and bit and clawed, and squeezed and pinched and sucked and laughter poured over us and Osterflood gurgled and choked and a voice said, `So it isn't bees after all,' and I rose up and holding Gina tight to me by the buttocks I fell to a kneeling position on the rug and then forward on top of her she already coming in a frenzied pelvic pulsation sucking and biting at my shoulder and I rammed and Osterflood gurgled and I rammed at her rammed and rammed and rammed my mouth filled with breast and laughter flowing over us ramming ram and it ah flowed out hot ah molten wet lava pouring into her in ah in ah in and ram once more time GOOD AH ah ah good good good seeing Osterflood to my left beautiful grinning lying on his side knees drawn toward his belly his face beautiful twisted in its hideous

  grin his cock stiff his belly spilling his semen pools onto the rug his eyes open glassy, staring, fixed, unmoving, dead.

  The Die giveth and the Die taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Die.

  Chapter Eighty-seven

  Dear Mr. Rhinehart and Company, We are deeply indebted to you here at Fedel's for the fine catalytic effect your theory of the dice life has had on sales and profits and on our lives. My business life had been giving me less and less satisfaction over the years. I had the usual ulcer and mistress, and I divorced my wife and took a dose of LSD or something and went to discotheques, but nothing helped: my profits and my indifference remained steady. Then I read an article about you in The New Yorker which I detest and never read, and located a follower of yours here in Columbus and I and my business haven't been the same since.

  The first thing the dice told me to do was raise wages across the board thirty percent and write commending personal letters to everyone. Efficiency jumped forty-three percent that month (it dropped back twenty-eight percent the next). Then the dice ordered me to stop manufacturing conventional hats (the family product for sixty-seven years), but to make experimental hats. My designers went out of their minds in ecstasy. Our first line of hats (you may have read about them in Ladies' Wear) was the highly successful `Boat Sombrero,' essentially a cowboy hat with a brim that tapers flush to the peak at the sides but flows out four inches in front and back.

  Although our profits declined fifteen percent, our sales leapt twenty percent and I wasn't bored anymore. Our second design was the rainhat that looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood and is made of brightly colored plastic suitable for both sexes. It's not going well at all (except in the South) but all of us at Fedel's think it's great. My profits turned at this point into a loss, but the Die's will be done.

  The Die then insisted we drop our number one moneymaking line of cheap men's expensive hats. Our retailers were appalled, but we were so engrossed in our third experimental design (the designer claims the Die make a key decision on it) that we didn't care. The `pancake' or `halo' (we haven't consulted the Die yet) is a disc-shaped headgear that works on the principle of the academic mortar board, but comes in a variety of colors, materials and shapes, although it is usually elliptical or circular. Our retail outlets are very skeptical, but have ordered so many on the basis of the success of the Boat Sombrero' that we're months behind in orders all ready.

  We're deeply in debt, but our top designers and management personnel have all voluntarily taken fifty percent wage cuts in exchange for a share of the profits on our `halo' line and we're going to survive. The Die last week ordered a designer of ours to design a hat that covers the whole body and although some of us are doubtful, he is going ahead with enthusiasm.

  To think I used to design and sell the same type of hat year after year! Please send us all your publications, and thank you for your help.

  Sincerely yours, Joseph Fedel, President Fedel's Hats, Columbus, Ohio.

  Chapter Eighty-eight

  Professor Boggles at a CETRE

  Dear Luke, I am a rational, linear, verbal, discursive, literary man and even your previous absurdities prepared me only minimally for the shock of my first week in the Catskill CETRE. I dutifully expressed anger, played Hamlet, pretended to be a fool, acted like an enraged tiger; I even swished my considerable hips effeminately when the Die tried to turn me into a woman. However, I did all this in isolation; I saw to it that none of my role-playing involved active interaction with other people. When other people attempted to impose their `selves' on me I became cynical inside, no matter what I was halfheartedly doing outside.

  A middle-aged woman grossly importuned me to seduce her and the Die dictated that I ought to respond favorably. I found myself slobbering on her neck and squeezing h
er expansive bosom but feeling totally detached. My phallus remained detumescent. After five minutes she huffed off to someone else.

  My awakening came on the fifth day, in the creativity room. The Die had chosen for me the assignment to write four pages using a new language - one employing primarily words from known vocabularies but combining them in a new grammar, syntax and diction. I was to try to express real feelings. I sat for an hour and couldn't get past doodles. Then -I finally wrote a sentence `Muckme piddles ping pong poetry.'

  I liked the sound of it but the syntax was too regular. I wrote a second `Skinned. Skinniedup, baked. Stick a.'

  That I felt was better, but lacking in verbs.

  `Farceuncle midwoof floops on the conch Harkening strayners at the dolor.'

  I smiled to myself: I felt I was getting closer to truth.

  `Missy-led clanker retchatches purr purr floops midwoof flushiting. I wonted crandy. Yo no crandy git, dabby sated. Yo knotted again, he, replyed jobbily. Fluckit shushit. Hotbam mastar.'

  But I was supposed to be expressing real feelings. How might I do that without being absurdly clear and trivial? I must proceed further, I thought: 'Mime a riter. A riter is sumun who rights. Words, wurts, worst … what too due? Fusshackle thought, ruddycup the blissbiz pronotions gaym, baby gone. Flat chance I have of whining a prize. Holy Muffer, merry of God . . . Ahhh.'

  Remaindered Redeemer, where dost thou go? Kink of the Whirl, you knot me so I ken not. Rash anality has deshitted me Of all my straineth. I beg you show me merdesee. Yoose your head, your my-end, your braying! Your rashan. ality

  1. He rashandill l (A reckoning crew will destroy us all.) Member, an hefull man is one who unjoys life, finds many playsures. He is a cheyeheld who nose nothink. Be rashanal and use sickology. But write, rite, right, reyet 1 Got is the kink of the Universe (Ice died for our since I ) Got is the kink of the Whirl (He nailrows what is wide and free) God makes ridid what is fleshible (To him who hass much shall be piled) The seven deadly Since he names, The thinks we've done, we must do penitentiary for (Luff, Hee says, is oil) Got so luffed the whirl that he graved is unly beGotten son that those that bleaf he died for their since may have infernal life.