The Dice Game

February's game in the What Will Be almanac was the Dice Game, devised by the Portland Surrealist Group (2001–2008).

Each player in turn rolls two dice and rapidly says a phrase or sentence comprised of the number of words shown on the dice. The dice are then quickly passed to the next player, who continues the narrative.

We played two rounds of this game and made audio recordings of the results, transcribed below.

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There were three men who ate straw cakes. It was a dark night of fire, and yellow pigtails were coming out of the north wind, which howled and whined and left in their traces a soft. There are too many fish in the pie with open windows. But that’s quite alright because then it fell sideways through a open door and into the great wall of darkness in which the open windows were shut once more. And six snakes left on the cube were finishing the reading of a book in the middle of an empty casket which had fallen from underneath the eleven sisters of nightmare who were eating those straws again. Something strange was about to happen. Nobody quite knew what it would be, so then a small piece of sugar tongue tray. So this is your secret, and only time will tell whether we’re going to be able to eat enough of these colossal empty octopus figures in which my old grandmother took out her false teeth and opened a new stanza of words. Down the passage way, the open casket found its way into the moonlight where a fox was eating bananas leaves and swimming naked in the shark infested lava pools of America. He.

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Small children playing with fire are never quite dowsed in petrol, until you put them in the bucket with water. It’s usually at that point that sugar cubes fall off tables and under the large tapestries which hang among the corpses of unburied giant anteaters which go backwards because their hair is triangular. But in the morning the dead never walk, because it is too easy a solution. Instead, they tend to congregate in halls and under Chihuahuas where they chew on straw cakes made of backwards-looking fish. Afterwards, she decided that the supermarket didn’t like her, so left to her own devices and sporting a geranium in pockets, she took out a gun and fired it into the midst of the small children who were eating lemon-flavoured cookies in which someone had put a very, very small bomb which exploded and caused pelican chaos throughout the night because the pope could not decide between apples and pears. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, spores were erupting from the elementary forces under the wood. When it was time to go home, the pixies put their belongings under the Vatican umbrella, so everybody could have a good body in the winterland of the mind. But a cattleprod that worked its way under the fingernails had not yet developed into a small, round, peculiar, spotted duck. It floated on a stream of piss, which was quite smelly but it didn’t matter because black wasps were stinging each side of her face without knowing which way up was, and so they went down because it was faster than going up. But we went sideways out of orange, and into a bleak setting. They were freezing the waltz, and cats chewed on the hedges of a surface. Nevertheless, the numbers two do not add up to anything sensible, so that is why I never go out with an umbrella under my wig. It so happens that just the day before, I had forgotten to pick up my lips. They were left to be thrown across the room without prejudice. This means that, unlike the blistered elbow, the red-bottomed orang-utan had not managed any mischief that day, so he picked his nose with a pipe cleaner. This was the nun’s favourite dream, because it was the dead of night. “I’m getting near to the end of my tether now,” she spat playfully, and wondered why nodoby else could see the ghosts which had congregated under that umbrella that I left. Carpet burn of the soul can be great fun because we know that edible trout can be found in every person’s thinking part, and even the unthinking part. “One more thing,” she said. “Totally.” “I wish I’d remembered to eat of my greens,” said the tortoise to the bishop. So tomorrow can be another day. Or then again, perhaps it can be exactly the same as yesterday, or not. I do not know where this coffee cup came from. I must throw it onto the fire until it cooled down and started another speech for today.

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The players were Paul Cowdell, Paul Day, Merl Fluin, Patrick Hourihan, Elva Jozef and Jonah Wilberg.