I awoke a little before seven, cuddled up to my wife Lillian, who was accordioned up into a Z in the bed beside me, and began pleasantly caressing her breasts, thighs and buttocks with my big gentle paws. I liked to begin the day this way: it set a standard by which to measure the gradual deterioration that succeeded from then on. After about four of five minutes we rolled over and began caressing me with her hands, and then with her lips, tongue and mouth.

‘Nnn morning, sweetheart,’ one of us would eventually say.

‘Nnnn,’ would say the other.

From that point on the day’s dialogue would all be downhill, but with warm, languid hands and lips floating over the body’s most sensitive surfaces, the world was as near perfection as it ever gets. Freud called it a state of ego-less polymorphous perversity and frowned upon it, but I have little doubt that he never had Lil’s hands gliding over him. Or his own wife’s for that matter. Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone ever effectively stroked his penis.

The Dice Man (Luke Rhinehart)