The following is a vignette inspired by 鬱P's Perfect Persona:
A bride, dressed all in white, inhales deeply before stepping through the doors of a small, steepled church with stained-glass windows as it stands in the foreground against a serene small-town backdrop. Her cheeks pink and pricked with a blush of adrenaline, and her long aqua-blue hair is tied into a twin, waist-length ponytail that drifts behind her as if it were in the grip of a pair of rutty, cheerful cherubs. She is empty-handed except for a flower bouquet of red roses wrapped tightly in expensive paper and tied with a dark red ribbon; a cross of lovely soft sashes intersects over her chest and runs around beneath her arms to then come up again over the back to be secured at the base of her neck.
The church's interior is modestly full; 30 or so people stand in clumps of association, chatting and idling on their phones, ordered in two rows of pews, separated by a carpeted thoroughfare leading to the altar, where a man in a conspicuously expensive-looking tuxedo stands opposite a plump and dowdy priest. In fact, all in attendance are a display of painfully embellished, high-thread-count, gaudily patterned suits and dresses of cuts and concepts that would normally not make their way past a Parisian catwalk, let alone serve as formal attire for an occasion in the rural steppes of this community. The bride's entrance has gone unnoticed by most of the crowd, save the tuxedoed man, who stares down at her smugly, a crooked smile splitting his lips and wrinkling the long, deep scars that part the skin on his left side like partially filled irrigation troughs. He runs his hands through his greasy, product-laced shock of sandy hair, almost self-consciously, almost to give the impression that he's not as nervous as he is, as he turns his head slightly to refocus his gaze on an older woman in a severely cut, broad-shouldered, and heavily tapered purple suit with the same flush of filthy cream-colored locks as his own. She doesn't return his stare; her eyes are turned down at her phone, flicking through graphs and columns of numbers. A younger version of herself hovers beside her in a similarly severe navy suit; a bored look sags the younger woman's features as she silently swipes through noxious bursts of luxurious lifestyle content. The older woman pauses mid-swipe before leaning down to whisper something to the younger woman at her side; a large, mustached man in a grey suit shifts tensely in his soft Italian loafers on the opposite side of the woman in purple, scanning the room as he overhears the brief exchange to his right. "The Senator's tip seems like it was spot on; you need to call your broker as soon as we're done here." "Clocked it, thanks." "You know, I'm not even sharing this with your brother; you could act a little more grateful when I share these kinds of things with you..." "Yeah, well, he's going to be set after today, isn't he?" The young woman glances over her shoulder at the bride still standing in the entryway and discharges a disgruntled huff. "What a freak..." The man in the grey suit follows the young woman's line of sight to the bride and coughs up a startled sound from the depths of his throat. "What the fuck? Where is her god damn escort? Someone find Joey and Enzo. I want them on her ass like cheese on my mother's risotto."
Still blushing, the bride's white teeth gleam like the tail of a shooting star, grinning as she sorts through her sashes with her free hand. Finding what she was searching for, she thrusts her arm out in front of her, straight and purposeful as if holding a saber; in her clenched fingers is a small white remote. Directing pressure through her thumb and onto a button, the music piping through the speakers in the small chamber of the building snaps from lofty opera standards to a blare of frantic stings and stormy electronics; a menacing momentum builds in the air. It is then that the man in the grey suit notices the body slumped in the entryway of the church, fresh blood speckling the concrete leading to the parking lot, the smell of iron slowly creeping into the house of worship—he reaches into the breast of his suit and takes hold of the cold steel within as recognition of the tailored suit on the crumpled form and the set of large ostentatious rings on its hands strike his mind like a lightning bolt. "Shit, god damn it! Doesn't anyone have a leash on this harpy?" Waving his piece for emphasis, the grey-suited man barks at a nearby guest, a clear subordinate. "Sal, grab that bitch! We're putting an end to this circus now!" Before the oily, dark-suited goon can fulfill his boss's request, though, the bride reaches into her bouquet and gives something inside a deliberate backwards tug, emitting a mechanical clicking as if something had shifted inside a small metal cylinder. "Holy mother, hit the deck!" The grey-suited man hollers to the room, raising his sidearm level with the bride's torso before his own chest erupts in a rupturing spurt of gore in synchronization with a roar of blast beats and toothy guitar grooves crashing out of the overtaxed sound system. The flower arrangement in the bride's hands has become a biting haze of smoke and fire, petals and stems breaking and bursting, their remnants falling away to reveal the cold countenance of a submachine gun, chattering in hot fury in the bride's talon-like grip. She fans a hot sheet of lead across the confined quarters of the room, cutting down the guest list by half before the attendees can turn to grasp the gravity of the dire straits they'd slipped into. Pews explode into pockets of splinters; the brick interior becomes marred by impacts like a lunar surface; a round strikes the priest in the throat, lacquering the unblemished side of the tuxedoed man's face with arterial splash as he surveys the carnage in awe and anger. Guests take cover where they can and let loose with reply from their own fiery steel in the direction of the bride, but her fatal command of the room is unchallengeable as she strafes along the perimeter, scouring the center of the room with a blazing shower of perdition. Retaliatory shots only ever strike close enough to graze her and rip her sashes and dress, causing them to fall open and reveal bandoliers packed with extended magazines and rows of holstered, small-capacity, high-caliber pistols; the latter she retrieves to pepper the room with while reloading her full-automatic casket stuffer. As she circles the periphery of her collected quarry, the bride pauses her assault only long enough to kick over baptismal fonts; once overturned, they flood the area with a harshly scented liquid, whose fumes could choke the breath out of anyone unlucky enough to take them into their lungs.
The woman in the purple dress is one such unfortunate soul. While hiding behind a pew that has been partially dismantled in the exchange of fire, she finds herself heaving as the stinking liquid soaks the carpet beneath her. In a scramble to seek fresh air, a slug from the bride's repeating saber pierces her spine and bursts out the front of her pelvis, causing her to slump where she is as her trunk pleats into a backward fold like a broken lawn chair. The last thing she sees is an inverted visage of the bride shoving a flagpole through the brassy, looped handles of a door leading to a side room just as angry voices congregate into a crescendo behind it. The barred door begins to shake as it is struck from its interior; curses and pistol-caliber rounds flow from behind the congested gateway into the main room of the church as the bride continues her fatal procession, now wading into the center aisle. A swarthy man in a white suit seizes a wishful window of grace when he believes he is in the bride's blind spot, springing above the safety of the cap rail with a double-barrel shotgun. He is surprised when his collarbone splits, his ribs become flayed, and his right arm is severed at the elbow before he is even able to level his aim; he collapses with a gurgle, losing his grip on his barreled piece. It slides to a stop at the bride's feet. She stomps the narrow point of her heel into the plate of the shotgun's butt, causing it to rise to her arm level in a pinwheel-like whirr. She catches the deadly implement and opens the breach to check that it is loaded. At that very moment, the door she had barred finally gives way in a rain of splinters. A grey and grizzled man whose girth resembled more bison than bipedal specimen, adorned in fine formal attire, has put his entire weight into the now shattered door, and the momentum of his strength has carried him through. Behind him are four equally well-dressed, stone-faced associates, each gripping their sidearms purposefully, scanning for a target. Unimpressed by this entrance, the bride unleashes both barrels into the small crowd of intruders, knocking them backward into a heap before the entryway they had just vacated. She coolly drops the now-empty armament before retrieving a pistol from her sash and picking off the survivors, of which there are only two. One of the surviving intruders is struggling under the weight and horror of the large grey man, attempting to free her arm and revolver from beneath his sunken and ruptured mass, averting her eyes from the bulk of exposed tubes and shredded glands of his now-exposed interior when a gap opens in her temple and the contents of her head slides out the other side. The other, a younger man with spiky black hair, manages to stagger to his feet and register a shot at his opponent before she pierces his jugular, resulting in his final moments being consumed in a futile fit of compression over his open neck before the icy flows running through his limbs cause him to lose his grip and slump to the floor in an awkward clump of clammy flesh, gushing crimson.
Sensing that the cull is nearing its climax, the bride proceeds towards the altar in a progression of eddying pirouettes, maintaining a constant rate of fire as she twirls, catching stragglers in the spray of her leaden claws as they expose themselves in a last gasp of vain bravado or flee for the open exit at the front of the church, including the young woman in the blue suit. A bullet passes through her abdomen; she doubles over, then claws up the side of a pew to persist in her getaway, only to find that her legs have become tangled in her own entrails. Toppling once more, she squirms in her own tangle of innerds and the spongy slickness of the carpet which has become saturated in the noxious, pinguid substance that had filled the baptismal fonts. The sounds emitted by the few remaining speakers is a cacophony of exalted, falsetto vocals, a vicious churn of razor-lined rhythms and bracing, full-contact grooves that accentuate the staccato of the bride's revolutions and relentless cycle of fire as a chorus of Armageddon, a punctuation to pure brimstone.
Finally, this black swan of white fury ascends the stairs of the altar and arrives at the threshold of the tuxedoed man's now-shattered psyche. As she approaches, his legs lose their constitution and he crumples gracelessly on his back, crabwalking backward to attempt to maintain his distance as her shadow overtakes him. Trembling, he cranes his neck as if to bear witness to the parting of the heavens and meets the bride's gaze, a crucifix looming overhead reflected sardonically back at him in the voids of her pupils. She is smiling at him, the most gruesome vision he has witnessed since the advent of the whole bloody ordeal, a more wretched sight than the swath of slaughter that swamps the chamber she has passed through to meet him at this apex. "Listen, there may have been some misunderstanding between us..." He stammers, drowning in sweat and panic. "Maybe you felt like you were getting a raw deal, but you're a very tough negotiator, and you've made your point. I'm willing to hear you out now; let's talk this through..." He flinches as she leans over him, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as to not see the blow he expects is coming. When none arrives, he reopens his eyes and takes in the bride once again as she towers over him. She has taken a tall lit candle from a candelabrum on the altar and now holds it at the full length of her arm by its white stalk overhead, shining like a beacon; her submachine gun is gripped tightly in the crook of her other arm, pressed into her ribs at a slight outturned angle, cradling it like it were her manifesto, her bible in action. She is still staring down at him, still smiling, but now softly shaking her head. "You... you... fucking bitch! You're fucking crazy!" He writhes out from beneath the pillar of her silhouette, stumbles on all fours, and rolls down the steps and away from the altar. "I'll kill you! You're so dead! I know some very dangerous people. You think you saw killers today! You have no idea the people I know... I... I..." His words drift into silence as a chilling sound accosts his ears. It is the bride; she's laughing now, still standing at the altar, laughter bubbling out of her with the effervescence of a thermal spring. He is sinking into the wet mass of fibers around him now, frozen in fear, sick and swamped with the vapors of spilled blood, the sulfurous tang of cartridge discharge, and the suffocating essence and acrid industrial aroma that has suffused the carpet from the overturned fonts. The bride lowers the candle in her grip; drawing it behind her, she then swings it forth in an underhanded arc, letting it slip from her grip. The lit waxen baton sails through the air and lands between the thighs of the now disheveled and broken tuxedo-clad man. He catches a final glimpse of her beaming, chortling face before an ice-colored inferno consumes his world. His body folds and compresses in the flame like old newspaper as the blue blaze spreads in a withering tear to engulf the entire carnage-soaked room.
Outside the church, emergency responders and police have begun to pull into the parking lot and quell the advance of a swarming, curious crowd of onlookers just as the stained-glass windows of the chapel-turned-tomb explode into violent twinkling rainbows of shattered varicolore reverie, flames belching from the front door and now-open windows as if the building were an open kiln. Firefighters hasten to and fro, attempting to wet the building with their hoses and contain the blaze. Around the rear of the building and away from the amassing crowd, a back door bends and creaks until it finally bursts open. A person in a fire-resistant uniform, different, but just barely distinguishable from those of the public servants attempting to battle the hellfire furnace that has swallowed the church- thick material, gas mask, reflective visor, and wide-brimmed helmet—teeters forward after knocking the door off its hinges with their shoulder. They stagger and then falter to their knees. An EMT rushes to the doubled-over figure and, slipping an arm around them, helps them stumble to his emergency vehicle. "What were you doing in there? That place is a fuckign furnace! I thought your captain told everyone to hold back and not go charging in. You could have been killed!" He hands his rescuee a bottle of water, which they accept politely but don't open. "Listen, it's bad that you were in there. You could get canned for being so reckless... what division are you from anyway?" There is no reply. The EMT's brow furrows and he's about to resume his line of inquiry when his attention is diverted by a coworker. "Hey Larry, we just got an estimate of what the body count might be. It's a god damn massacre. Looks like it could be the whole Conti family in there. I just got a text from my girlfriend in dispatch. Take a look at this." The EMT pauses, torn between his duty and morbid curiosity. "Alright, be right there." He shoots his rescuee a stern look. "Don't go anywhere." The EMT lumbers off in the direction of his coworker, his back turned to the mysterious figure sitting on the bumper of his vehicle. Nary a moment passes before the figure has noiselessly slunk off towards an adjoining field, sifting through the ripening stalks of grain; they slough off their fire-retardant clothing to reveal a familiar face. The bride, or former bride, her visage smeared with ash and blood, eyes pricked with a veiny redness and slightly watery from irritation, has shed her nuptial attire, and now slinks out into the night in a black matching set of polyamide athletic bra and shorts; she is otherwise bare except for a smile and a pack of cigarettes tucked into her waistband. As she weaves through the field, she retrieves the carton and plucks out two darts and a lighter; guarding the flame with her palm, she lights both, inhales with ecstasy, and exhales with relief. Behind her, the church continues to burn. She doesn't look back; she doesn't need to. Everything that matters to her at this point lies straight ahead.
The church's interior is modestly full; 30 or so people stand in clumps of association, chatting and idling on their phones, ordered in two rows of pews, separated by a carpeted thoroughfare leading to the altar, where a man in a conspicuously expensive-looking tuxedo stands opposite a plump and dowdy priest. In fact, all in attendance are a display of painfully embellished, high-thread-count, gaudily patterned suits and dresses of cuts and concepts that would normally not make their way past a Parisian catwalk, let alone serve as formal attire for an occasion in the rural steppes of this community. The bride's entrance has gone unnoticed by most of the crowd, save the tuxedoed man, who stares down at her smugly, a crooked smile splitting his lips and wrinkling the long, deep scars that part the skin on his left side like partially filled irrigation troughs. He runs his hands through his greasy, product-laced shock of sandy hair, almost self-consciously, almost to give the impression that he's not as nervous as he is, as he turns his head slightly to refocus his gaze on an older woman in a severely cut, broad-shouldered, and heavily tapered purple suit with the same flush of filthy cream-colored locks as his own. She doesn't return his stare; her eyes are turned down at her phone, flicking through graphs and columns of numbers. A younger version of herself hovers beside her in a similarly severe navy suit; a bored look sags the younger woman's features as she silently swipes through noxious bursts of luxurious lifestyle content. The older woman pauses mid-swipe before leaning down to whisper something to the younger woman at her side; a large, mustached man in a grey suit shifts tensely in his soft Italian loafers on the opposite side of the woman in purple, scanning the room as he overhears the brief exchange to his right. "The Senator's tip seems like it was spot on; you need to call your broker as soon as we're done here." "Clocked it, thanks." "You know, I'm not even sharing this with your brother; you could act a little more grateful when I share these kinds of things with you..." "Yeah, well, he's going to be set after today, isn't he?" The young woman glances over her shoulder at the bride still standing in the entryway and discharges a disgruntled huff. "What a freak..." The man in the grey suit follows the young woman's line of sight to the bride and coughs up a startled sound from the depths of his throat. "What the fuck? Where is her god damn escort? Someone find Joey and Enzo. I want them on her ass like cheese on my mother's risotto."
Still blushing, the bride's white teeth gleam like the tail of a shooting star, grinning as she sorts through her sashes with her free hand. Finding what she was searching for, she thrusts her arm out in front of her, straight and purposeful as if holding a saber; in her clenched fingers is a small white remote. Directing pressure through her thumb and onto a button, the music piping through the speakers in the small chamber of the building snaps from lofty opera standards to a blare of frantic stings and stormy electronics; a menacing momentum builds in the air. It is then that the man in the grey suit notices the body slumped in the entryway of the church, fresh blood speckling the concrete leading to the parking lot, the smell of iron slowly creeping into the house of worship—he reaches into the breast of his suit and takes hold of the cold steel within as recognition of the tailored suit on the crumpled form and the set of large ostentatious rings on its hands strike his mind like a lightning bolt. "Shit, god damn it! Doesn't anyone have a leash on this harpy?" Waving his piece for emphasis, the grey-suited man barks at a nearby guest, a clear subordinate. "Sal, grab that bitch! We're putting an end to this circus now!" Before the oily, dark-suited goon can fulfill his boss's request, though, the bride reaches into her bouquet and gives something inside a deliberate backwards tug, emitting a mechanical clicking as if something had shifted inside a small metal cylinder. "Holy mother, hit the deck!" The grey-suited man hollers to the room, raising his sidearm level with the bride's torso before his own chest erupts in a rupturing spurt of gore in synchronization with a roar of blast beats and toothy guitar grooves crashing out of the overtaxed sound system. The flower arrangement in the bride's hands has become a biting haze of smoke and fire, petals and stems breaking and bursting, their remnants falling away to reveal the cold countenance of a submachine gun, chattering in hot fury in the bride's talon-like grip. She fans a hot sheet of lead across the confined quarters of the room, cutting down the guest list by half before the attendees can turn to grasp the gravity of the dire straits they'd slipped into. Pews explode into pockets of splinters; the brick interior becomes marred by impacts like a lunar surface; a round strikes the priest in the throat, lacquering the unblemished side of the tuxedoed man's face with arterial splash as he surveys the carnage in awe and anger. Guests take cover where they can and let loose with reply from their own fiery steel in the direction of the bride, but her fatal command of the room is unchallengeable as she strafes along the perimeter, scouring the center of the room with a blazing shower of perdition. Retaliatory shots only ever strike close enough to graze her and rip her sashes and dress, causing them to fall open and reveal bandoliers packed with extended magazines and rows of holstered, small-capacity, high-caliber pistols; the latter she retrieves to pepper the room with while reloading her full-automatic casket stuffer. As she circles the periphery of her collected quarry, the bride pauses her assault only long enough to kick over baptismal fonts; once overturned, they flood the area with a harshly scented liquid, whose fumes could choke the breath out of anyone unlucky enough to take them into their lungs.
The woman in the purple dress is one such unfortunate soul. While hiding behind a pew that has been partially dismantled in the exchange of fire, she finds herself heaving as the stinking liquid soaks the carpet beneath her. In a scramble to seek fresh air, a slug from the bride's repeating saber pierces her spine and bursts out the front of her pelvis, causing her to slump where she is as her trunk pleats into a backward fold like a broken lawn chair. The last thing she sees is an inverted visage of the bride shoving a flagpole through the brassy, looped handles of a door leading to a side room just as angry voices congregate into a crescendo behind it. The barred door begins to shake as it is struck from its interior; curses and pistol-caliber rounds flow from behind the congested gateway into the main room of the church as the bride continues her fatal procession, now wading into the center aisle. A swarthy man in a white suit seizes a wishful window of grace when he believes he is in the bride's blind spot, springing above the safety of the cap rail with a double-barrel shotgun. He is surprised when his collarbone splits, his ribs become flayed, and his right arm is severed at the elbow before he is even able to level his aim; he collapses with a gurgle, losing his grip on his barreled piece. It slides to a stop at the bride's feet. She stomps the narrow point of her heel into the plate of the shotgun's butt, causing it to rise to her arm level in a pinwheel-like whirr. She catches the deadly implement and opens the breach to check that it is loaded. At that very moment, the door she had barred finally gives way in a rain of splinters. A grey and grizzled man whose girth resembled more bison than bipedal specimen, adorned in fine formal attire, has put his entire weight into the now shattered door, and the momentum of his strength has carried him through. Behind him are four equally well-dressed, stone-faced associates, each gripping their sidearms purposefully, scanning for a target. Unimpressed by this entrance, the bride unleashes both barrels into the small crowd of intruders, knocking them backward into a heap before the entryway they had just vacated. She coolly drops the now-empty armament before retrieving a pistol from her sash and picking off the survivors, of which there are only two. One of the surviving intruders is struggling under the weight and horror of the large grey man, attempting to free her arm and revolver from beneath his sunken and ruptured mass, averting her eyes from the bulk of exposed tubes and shredded glands of his now-exposed interior when a gap opens in her temple and the contents of her head slides out the other side. The other, a younger man with spiky black hair, manages to stagger to his feet and register a shot at his opponent before she pierces his jugular, resulting in his final moments being consumed in a futile fit of compression over his open neck before the icy flows running through his limbs cause him to lose his grip and slump to the floor in an awkward clump of clammy flesh, gushing crimson.
Sensing that the cull is nearing its climax, the bride proceeds towards the altar in a progression of eddying pirouettes, maintaining a constant rate of fire as she twirls, catching stragglers in the spray of her leaden claws as they expose themselves in a last gasp of vain bravado or flee for the open exit at the front of the church, including the young woman in the blue suit. A bullet passes through her abdomen; she doubles over, then claws up the side of a pew to persist in her getaway, only to find that her legs have become tangled in her own entrails. Toppling once more, she squirms in her own tangle of innerds and the spongy slickness of the carpet which has become saturated in the noxious, pinguid substance that had filled the baptismal fonts. The sounds emitted by the few remaining speakers is a cacophony of exalted, falsetto vocals, a vicious churn of razor-lined rhythms and bracing, full-contact grooves that accentuate the staccato of the bride's revolutions and relentless cycle of fire as a chorus of Armageddon, a punctuation to pure brimstone.
Finally, this black swan of white fury ascends the stairs of the altar and arrives at the threshold of the tuxedoed man's now-shattered psyche. As she approaches, his legs lose their constitution and he crumples gracelessly on his back, crabwalking backward to attempt to maintain his distance as her shadow overtakes him. Trembling, he cranes his neck as if to bear witness to the parting of the heavens and meets the bride's gaze, a crucifix looming overhead reflected sardonically back at him in the voids of her pupils. She is smiling at him, the most gruesome vision he has witnessed since the advent of the whole bloody ordeal, a more wretched sight than the swath of slaughter that swamps the chamber she has passed through to meet him at this apex. "Listen, there may have been some misunderstanding between us..." He stammers, drowning in sweat and panic. "Maybe you felt like you were getting a raw deal, but you're a very tough negotiator, and you've made your point. I'm willing to hear you out now; let's talk this through..." He flinches as she leans over him, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as to not see the blow he expects is coming. When none arrives, he reopens his eyes and takes in the bride once again as she towers over him. She has taken a tall lit candle from a candelabrum on the altar and now holds it at the full length of her arm by its white stalk overhead, shining like a beacon; her submachine gun is gripped tightly in the crook of her other arm, pressed into her ribs at a slight outturned angle, cradling it like it were her manifesto, her bible in action. She is still staring down at him, still smiling, but now softly shaking her head. "You... you... fucking bitch! You're fucking crazy!" He writhes out from beneath the pillar of her silhouette, stumbles on all fours, and rolls down the steps and away from the altar. "I'll kill you! You're so dead! I know some very dangerous people. You think you saw killers today! You have no idea the people I know... I... I..." His words drift into silence as a chilling sound accosts his ears. It is the bride; she's laughing now, still standing at the altar, laughter bubbling out of her with the effervescence of a thermal spring. He is sinking into the wet mass of fibers around him now, frozen in fear, sick and swamped with the vapors of spilled blood, the sulfurous tang of cartridge discharge, and the suffocating essence and acrid industrial aroma that has suffused the carpet from the overturned fonts. The bride lowers the candle in her grip; drawing it behind her, she then swings it forth in an underhanded arc, letting it slip from her grip. The lit waxen baton sails through the air and lands between the thighs of the now disheveled and broken tuxedo-clad man. He catches a final glimpse of her beaming, chortling face before an ice-colored inferno consumes his world. His body folds and compresses in the flame like old newspaper as the blue blaze spreads in a withering tear to engulf the entire carnage-soaked room.
Outside the church, emergency responders and police have begun to pull into the parking lot and quell the advance of a swarming, curious crowd of onlookers just as the stained-glass windows of the chapel-turned-tomb explode into violent twinkling rainbows of shattered varicolore reverie, flames belching from the front door and now-open windows as if the building were an open kiln. Firefighters hasten to and fro, attempting to wet the building with their hoses and contain the blaze. Around the rear of the building and away from the amassing crowd, a back door bends and creaks until it finally bursts open. A person in a fire-resistant uniform, different, but just barely distinguishable from those of the public servants attempting to battle the hellfire furnace that has swallowed the church- thick material, gas mask, reflective visor, and wide-brimmed helmet—teeters forward after knocking the door off its hinges with their shoulder. They stagger and then falter to their knees. An EMT rushes to the doubled-over figure and, slipping an arm around them, helps them stumble to his emergency vehicle. "What were you doing in there? That place is a fuckign furnace! I thought your captain told everyone to hold back and not go charging in. You could have been killed!" He hands his rescuee a bottle of water, which they accept politely but don't open. "Listen, it's bad that you were in there. You could get canned for being so reckless... what division are you from anyway?" There is no reply. The EMT's brow furrows and he's about to resume his line of inquiry when his attention is diverted by a coworker. "Hey Larry, we just got an estimate of what the body count might be. It's a god damn massacre. Looks like it could be the whole Conti family in there. I just got a text from my girlfriend in dispatch. Take a look at this." The EMT pauses, torn between his duty and morbid curiosity. "Alright, be right there." He shoots his rescuee a stern look. "Don't go anywhere." The EMT lumbers off in the direction of his coworker, his back turned to the mysterious figure sitting on the bumper of his vehicle. Nary a moment passes before the figure has noiselessly slunk off towards an adjoining field, sifting through the ripening stalks of grain; they slough off their fire-retardant clothing to reveal a familiar face. The bride, or former bride, her visage smeared with ash and blood, eyes pricked with a veiny redness and slightly watery from irritation, has shed her nuptial attire, and now slinks out into the night in a black matching set of polyamide athletic bra and shorts; she is otherwise bare except for a smile and a pack of cigarettes tucked into her waistband. As she weaves through the field, she retrieves the carton and plucks out two darts and a lighter; guarding the flame with her palm, she lights both, inhales with ecstasy, and exhales with relief. Behind her, the church continues to burn. She doesn't look back; she doesn't need to. Everything that matters to her at this point lies straight ahead.
