Raphael Bob-Waksberg

As per the goats of it all—” I start to say, but I’m immediately thrown off by the weirdness of starting a sentence with the phrase “as per the goats of it all.” That was a poor choice. I thought I could pull it off. I couldn’t pull it off.

And I like to think I’m a reasonable man. A modern, sophisticated, sensible man. But no daughter of mine is getting married at a wedding without goat slaughter.”

I immediately think of a hundred Wrong Things to Say, but I can’t for the life of me think of a single Right Thing to Say, so instead I shout the most un-Wrong of the Wrong Things I can think of, which is “All the normal reasons!”

Yeah,” I say. “The normal reasons. Like, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It’s all the dumb clichés about how even when I’m mad at you I love you and how every day the best part of it is waking up next to you. And it kills me that this is all the normal, typical people-in-love stuff, because I want to believe our love is special—that it’s bigger and more interesting than any love that anyone else has had before—but the heartbreaking truth is my love for you is so consistent and predictable and boring.”

Now, let me tell you, I thought Dorothy was beautiful before, but when I’m standing at the altar and I see her walk into the Good Church in her marriage cloak—the stained-glass windows behind her—well, I could live to be a hundred and it would still be the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. And in that moment I think: This is the best possible way to have a wedding, because it’s the kind of wedding where while it’s happening, I get to marry Dorothy.

My little brother does the goat sacrifice himself—we settle on fifty goats, a good round number—and it goes off without a hitch, except for a half hour later, during Aunt Estelle’s reading of the Gertrude Stein poem, it turns out one of the goats didn’t all the way die and it bucks off the sacrificial altar and scrambles up and down the aisle, braying and squealing and shooting blood everywhere. My little brother jumps up and tries to tackle it, but it’s a slippery little thing, all lubed up with the blood and guts of forty-nine other goats. Blood is squirting everywhere, and my mother leans in and whispers, “This is why you get a professional goat slaughterer.”

Of course, this sets off one of the guys in the Shrieking Chorus. He starts Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations. And then the guy next to him starts Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations. And before you know it all twelve of them are climbing over the pews, their eyes rolled back in their heads, Weeping and Flailing and Shouting Lamentations.

Meanwhile, Aunt Estelle is still reading the Gertrude Stein poem, and she doesn’t know what to do, so she just starts reading it louder and louder.

I look at my bride, who is standing at the altar, frozen, mouth agape—mouth very agape—like for real I guarantee you’ve never seen a mouth so agape.

She looks at me with her big forest-flavored eyes, like, Can you believe this?

And I look at her, like, Well, what did we expect?

The goat convulses in my arms, and Dorothy starts laughing. Then she puts her arm up and juts her chin out, like she’s about to start doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and I start laughing. She’s laughing, and I’m laughing, and I swear to Gods I’m the luckiest man in the world. I look at her, lit by fire, caked in blood, scored by the Shrieking of the Chorus and the wailing of a dying goat, and I wish I could marry her again. I wish I could marry her a hundred thousand times.

it is furthermore becoming increasingly apparent that if I go pick out a Promise Egg without her input I’m going to screw it up, and then it’s going to sit in a display case in our living room for the rest of our marriage—a testament to how badly I screwed it up, a testament to how I always screw things up, a testament to how I will continue to screw things up forever.

You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.

And I imagined that if I were in some other, better universe, there’d be someone who could tell me, It’s okay, or You’ll get ’em next time, tiger. Someone would tell me that all the stupid things I’d done, all my mistakes, they didn’t matter. This someone would say that, no matter what, she was proud of me, that I filled her heart with warmth, and that that’s really the most you could hope for in life—to just for an instant make somebody else just a little bit happier. She would tell me that—guess what!—everything was going to be all right.