2210 AD, mostly empty, saliva-frothed, crushed aluminum cans cluttered the streets. Man feasted voraciously on fellow man; except in certain Kosher instances which were rare. Under those grave conditions, riddled with fear, anguish and tumult, citizens fought for their one-foot-in-the-grave lives and, in doing so, hoped to strike it rich. Freaks lined the streets with stages upon which they pushed themselves to their limits in all sorts of indecent ways.

Amongst the freaks, Sam, a man of integrity, stuck to his guns. He had the utmost respect for his audiences and didn't insult them with cheap sex ploys. Unlike most women who took it off in public for a living, Sam's girls were Vestal Virgins who, in addition to being versed in Greek mythology, spoke Latin fluently.

It would've been a glorious, bright autumn afternoon, were the sun not mostly hidden by sooty, thick industrial clouds. Sam had taken in an inkling of sun while sprawled out over his rust-orange bed of nails in a loin cloth. With a message for the more respectable folks and large, succulent breasts freely jostling about for the others, he and his lovely assistants raked in the dough as though it were going out of style. At their rate, they'd make it to Vegas within a year; and, as if that weren't enough, Sam would be picking up a crate full of tweezers at the docks in an hour.

He'd have been picking up a first-born child rather than a crate full of tweezers; but, having no idea as to how he'd have sold Abdul's son into slavery and having figured that tweezers were worth more, he'd agreed to accept the tweezers in place of the child. Having figured as he had, a crate of tweezers was worth a child, five elephants and a drunkard with a limp. Indeed, tweezers were a valuable good. By virtue of their having been outlawed two decades earlier, they were hard to come by.

Tweezerists, unorthodox Christians who meant well, had blinded thousands of average, tax-paying citizens with their sacred tweezers and without having checked it with God. Having been in the wrong by virtue of John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle, the Tweezerists had forfeited their right to worship as they pleased; and, had the Law not outlawed their paraphernalia, the saner half of the public would have been satisfied. As it were, everyone had to live without tweezers; and the most of them hated blind people.

Sam took his cash, bidding Delores and Kitten fairwell. "Kitten, we'll get those splinters out of your feet no matter what it takes." He, of course, knew that it wouldn't take much but wanted it to appear as though he were a decent guy and a miracle-worker at that. With a suggestive wink and a pat on Kitten's wanton's rump roast, he set out for the docks.

Hastening down the street without a moment to spare and having walked no farther than a couple of blocks, Sam sighed noisily as an old, blind hag stumbled off a bus that had stopped up ahead. It was just his luck that he'd be stuck behind the sluggish abomination. Initially, he gave her the benefit of the doubt and tried to get around her without making a scene; but, she'd monopolized the sidewalk. He was fed-up; and, besides, he hated blind people. Without further adieu, he shoved her out of his way and threw her walker out into the middle of the street where it was crushed beneath the wheels of an oncoming semi.




Mac, the trucker, pulled over to the side of the road, jumped out of his truck and perused the scene. At first, he seemed a bit concerned; but, after he saw that the old hag was blind, immobile and incapable of speech, he took her into his semi trailer with him to toy with her perversely before flattening her skull with a sledgehammer and making a mess that would be hard to explain to the management. He took her fifty miles up north and left her to rot in a ditch on the side of the road. He said a quick prayer; and, though he'd have come up with something a bit more original than Hail Mary, he was pressed for time and with a gory mess in his trailer.

Night after night, Mary, his wife, worked late into the evening with her boss. What? Did she think he was blind? She thought she'd pulled the wool over her husband's eyes; but, unbeknownst to her, he was on top of it.

He'd befriended Bob, the retarded janitor who worked in her building and had asked him to keep an eye on his wife and her boss. Coincidentally, Bob had taken the liberty of peeping in on the two and had, in fact, taken hundreds of snapshots of the two in action. He was more than cordial about making prints for Mac but would be damned if he'd let go of the negatives.

Mac relished the thought that his wife hadn't a clue he'd known she'd been cheating on him from the start and that, all the while, he'd been getting even with her--leaving a countless number of corpses rotting in ditches around the country. He could hardly contain his delight; and he was seized with a sickly grin as he floored the gas to hit a jack rabbit that was hopping across the road just in front of him. He'd make it to his destination dead on time.



Kitten stood in front of the bathroom mirror as she primped her hair and admired its wavy body. She puckered her lips and sauced them up with bright red lipstick. Before the night's end, she'd have Sam under her thumb. He'd give her the tweezers and reveal his source to her. Of course, she'd surmised he'd attempt to mislead her; but she'd find a means by which she might break his spirits and adhere him to her wicked cause.

"Ha! I'm sure the poor fool is still convinced that I really am a Vestal Virgin!"--far from it. She'd slept with hundreds of men and had contracted several bizarre venereal diseases. She'd murdered dozens of men and women on her way to the top.

Ever since her childhood, she'd thirsted for power with the whole of her depraved soul. She'd dreamed of hooking into the tweezer black market since she'd first become aware of its existence; and, though her parents and schoolmates had offered her nothing but discouragement, she kept a stiff upper lip. Now many years stood between her and her unpleasant childhood; and she'd slept with a countless number of disgusting men, every one of which she'd hated, in effort to secure her future. The time had come for her to prove she'd been right all along. She'd become the biggest tweezer distributor in the country; and, with any luck at all, she'd have so much clout she might easily seize control of the country--then, the world. Then and only then, would she be in a position to milk everyone for all their worth. She'd show them, every single one of them, that she'd been right all along. She shivered with anticipation.



Sam was glad everything had run smoothly at the shipyard; and he was looking forward to spending his evening with Kitten. His arms were full of magnificent commodities ; and she would surely be impressed. He entered her apartment complex, climbed two flights of stairs and made his way down the corridor to apartment twelve. He straightened his collar and cleared his throat before reaching for the doorknob.

He opened the door to find her sprawled out naked in a sub-orgasmic state. Of course, he wasn't expecting anything quite so forward; and, consequently, he wondered what was behind this bold exhibition of sensual yearning, though not to the extent that it frightened him. After all all, it wasn't as though she were a man.

"Mmmmmm...Do you have the tweezers?" Kitten rolled gently into an upright position and stroked her hair back from her meticulously dolled-up face.

"Yeah, doll...let's get rid of those splinters, huh?" He set his purchase down on her kitchen table, cleared a shelf in her refrigerator and slid his case of beer into place. He produced a pair of tweezers from his top pocket; and, with a wink and keen smile, he set his knees to the carpet beside her and dove headlong into his do-good deed. He lapped up her enthusiasm in a superimposed nonchalant manner and continued to pull out her splinters in a methodical fashion.

"Yes...Oh, Jesus, yes." She purred in a whisper.

Little did Sam gather, she was merely leading him into a nightmare from which he might never escape. It failed to occur to him that he might regret this twisted flicker of sensuality for the remainder of his depraved existence. He certainly hadn't the sight to enable him to notice that within this apparently innocent beauty lurked a cold, calculating parasite with no other aim than that of crushing his dreams in effort to procure the tweezers and its own vile self. Rather, he imagined he would soon have Kitten under his thumb such that he might satisfy his sensual yearnings; and, as he saw it, the tweezers were working like a charm. "...And voila. That takes care of that. How do you feel, huh?" He squinted slightly as he moved in on her.

"Ohhhhhh...much, much better." She proceeded to button-down his shirt with smooth diligence--her eyes, open slightly, focused on the lowest button. At the end of her journey, she brought her eyes back up to meet his.

Sam brought himself to a kneeling upright position to pull his shirt from his shoulders while Kitten crouched low in front of him. She crept up on him gently and kissed herself up his chest to meet his lips with hers. He caressed her silky skin with his rough hands, smoothing over every voluptuous curve with glorious passion. He reached down to unbutton his fly.

"Mmmmmm..."Kitten pulled her lips from his. "I'll be right back." She slinked softly into her bedroom.

Sam pulled his jeans down from his hips and pulled his feet out of them while gazing into the shaggy red carpet. A pair of shiny, stainless steel handcuffs, thrown from across the room, landed at his feet; and he raised his eyes to guage their intent.

"Cuff yourself to the radiator and don't try anything funny." Kitten stood there, just outside of her bedroom, with a revolver aimed squarely between his eyes.

"C'mon, put the gun down; and let's talk this over." He took a couple of steps toward her.

"Listen, I mean it." She cocked her revolver in an abruptly surly manner.

He squinted in disbelief and locked his eyes on hers to be certain that she was determined to make him cuff himself to the radiator. After a moment of disillusioning silence, he picked up the handcuffs and edged slowly toward the radiator. "C'mon Kitten, tell me what you want from me and it's yours." He stalled at the radiator for a moment.

"I want you cuffed to the radiator...hands behind your back...helpless...completely helpless." Her eyes widened; and she cackled madly.

He cuffed himself to the radiator.

She grabbed a roll of duct tape off the kitchen table as she closed in on him. She set her revolver down on the floor and straddled him. "Isn't it funny to think..." She smiled as she pulled a healthy strip of tape from its roll. "...that your life could be over in the blink of an eye?"

“Are you out of your mind? What's the point of this?"

"Shhhhh..." Kitten pressed her right index finger over Sam's lips and followed it with a long, sensual kiss. "You don't know what you're saying." She leaned back upright and wrapped her strip of tape around the back of his head before sticking an orange into his mouth and stretching the tape around his face and over it.

Beads of sweat on his forehead were running down into his eyes and burning into them. For a moment, he closed his eyes in effort to alleviate their discomfort. The burning sensation intensified at first; but he felt a bit better before Kitten shifted her weight in the direction of she'd set her gun down. His heart was fighting its way out of his rib cage; and his thoughts were scurrying through his mind...vanishing before he could grasp a single one anymore distinct than: "No...God, no...Don't let it come to this." He felt her shift her weight back such that it rested over him as before. He felt the revolver's barrel stroked over his left temple; and he shuddered slightly as he opened his eyes.

Kitten was pleased to find that she'd landed Sam's undivided attention. She crept back and set her face in his crotch and her revolver to his gut. She soon found that he was at her command; and she took him to the brink of rapture but left him yearning for the end she wasn't about to enable him to reach

"Hard Ball" Copyright 1998 Nicholas Alan Tillemans. All Rights Reserved.

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