by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Social Media Writer
Archibald Opteryx looked uncomfortable standing at the lip of the volcano.
“What ho, my love?” he gamely asked. “Are you sure this is, strictly speaking, safe?”
“Not now Archie!” his fiancee, Mellifluent Diamondback (of the Te Nahasi-Coates, Florida Diamondbacks) shouted as she consulted with the photographer. “We’re debating the most effective angle at which to shoot your…unique face. …My love.”
“Oh, ah, well, far be it from me to advise on technical matters, although I have been told that the best side of my face is the back of my head. For what that’s worth. Carry on,” Opteryx waved a hand. Or, he would have, if his hands hadn’t been tied behind his back with a jungle vine. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, accentuating the fact that he was wearing nothing but a loincloth, which showed off his pasty body to ill effect.
Father Fernand Occipinti, standing next to Opteryx in a modified Conquistador’s uniform, looked at Diamondback and the director and said, “How much longer is this going to take? I have a christening in an hour, and if getting up this volcano is any indication of how long it will take to get dow –”
“Chill, Rev!” Diamondback advised. “We’re just about set.”
Opteryx smiled in a way he hoped was brave and told the Priest, “Mellifluent can be very strong-willed, as I’m sure you noticed. But she’s a smashing girl! Truly –” He looked down for a moment and almost swooned. “Umm…truly smashing!”
After the funeral, Diamondback explained that she couldn’t, just couldn’t have an ordinary wedding. “Augusta Aubergine’s CSI-themed wedding, with its beakers of formaldehyde and guests firing weapons into blocks of wood, got over three million views on TickTalk, one million and eight hundred thousand likes and almost seven hundred thousand shares! Even though the cake was accidentally poisoned by arsenic that had been left open near a centrifuge, killing the groom and sending all of the bridesmaids and half of the families and friends to hospital! I knew I had to do something to top that!”
Diamondback’s idea was to hold a virgin sacrifice-themed wedding. Not wanting her social media followers to think, at the seasoned age of 23, that she could still be a virgin, she convinced her groom to step into the role.
“He was such a good sport about it!” she gushed from under the veil. “If only his vertigo hadn’t chosen such an unfortunate moment to announce itself!”
I wasn’t certain if the moment to which she was referring was the one where the sun had started to set, casting a golden glow over the wedding party standing around the lip of the volcano, or the one where Father Occipinti had started to recite the husband’s vows. Given that the two moments were, in fact, the same moment, it may be impossible to disambiguate them.
I couldn’t help but see a pattern, here, so I asked Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour, the Alternate Reality News Service’s advice columnist par excellence, if it was possible that brides were sacrificing grooms at their weddings to create more engagement in social media.
“Of course not,” she answered (after getting my assurance that she would be referred to in my article as a “columnist par excellence“). “That would be illegal, and nobody has been arrested yet. I’m sure the fact that six of the seven most popular wedding videos on TickTalk involve the accidental death of the groom – although the penguin inhalation massacre is suspect considering the wedding was desert genie-themed – is a coincidence that could be explained away by highly advanced mathematics.”
With a stylish wave of her hand to dismiss the coincidence, Amritsar earned her par excellence.
When I commented that I was astonished that so many deaths had occurred at weddings, Amritsar assured me that it was nowhere near as many as happened during the Plague. For some reason, I did not feel assured.
UPDATE: A week later, I discovered that a video of the aborted wedding that Diamondback had loaded to TickTalk had over four and a half million views, over two million likes and over fifty thousand shares. “I think the shares could have been stronger,” Diamondback commented. “But I’m thrilled to bits that Archie’s death wasn’t in vain.”