The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 32
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

Reception

Anar Ahuja’s father was worth $131 billion, so the wedding was really something to behold. The groom’s father wore a Saville Row suit, kind of pointedly, it seemed to us, since the rest of the guests were in Indian resplendence. He made a speech that I think I remember from Love, Actually. Anar himself, the dimmest brother from a brood of wastrels, hadn’t bothered with a haircut but had managed to pour himself into a gold sherwani with blue agate buttons and clashing vermillion trim. The bride was a model, a movie star, a singer and, the newspapers informed us, a philanthropist. She wore a beautiful matching gold anarkali dripping with pearls. I bore her no special ill-will so I shot her first.
          The former US Secretary of State was in attendance, unreachably flanked by Secret Service. More touchable were the social media moguls, and we nabbed two of them (combined worth: $300+ billion) and a bevy of reality stars (somewhere around $11 billion total). We shot at Beyoncé while she was leading the dancing, but our heart wasn’t really in it. Much more interesting to line up the three older Ahuja boys and their father and torture them for the livestream.
          If you want it you got to put a ring on it was stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
          The security guards were mostly ours, or their families were, so we knew we had a few minutes before the real heavies arrived. The first of our vans left, taking different routes. In one of the side rooms there was a group mani-pedi, which we interrupted with machetes. Fingers and toes and gore and glitter and henna bubbled like a stew in the plastic water baths. Someone shot me in the side of the face but I barely noticed.
          We’d brought along a guillotine but in all the excitement we forgot to use it.
          We fed Ivanka to her father. One of us got kicked by a horse and died among the confetti strings, coughing on his intestines. The stage magician, I swear this is true, disappeared in a puff of smoke. I can’t even be mad at that. Outside, one of us was breaking the locks off all the cages, and soon there were elephants and tigers and peacocks and swans and monkeys and gorillas and rhinoceri and hippos and pandas and pythons and deer and crocodiles and lizards and dogs and birds of all sorts filling the streets of Mumbai. It was a beautiful confusion. They ate each other, they ate or pecked at people. My brother’s arm was bitten off by a hippo, and when I shot it it just lumbered away without seeming to notice, the imperturbable beast!
          I castrated Stephen Miller myself. This is the part of the day that I am most proud of. When the police finally arrived he was still bleeding out at my feet. The police didn’t bother asking us to surrender, just started shooting. Respect. Two of us dragged what was left of the bridal party and a shit-stained Elon Musk into the main hall and in front of the cameras of the world I unzipped my jacket to show the bomb. They shot me at once, not that it mattered.
          When I blew us up, I’ve been given to understand, cracked gems and sharp gold and silver shards and trails of flaming fabric rained down on the neighborhood, and children filled the streets to receive the bounty with their hands outcupped.
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