I’m not drunk, drunk.  Not seeing double, drunk.  Not gonna walk in a straight line though.  Good thing I’m sitting down.  I dunno, it’s been a long weekend.  Whose idea was it to go from the bachelor party straight to the wedding? That one’s not on me.

Ow, what just poked me – oh… oh.  Oh God, Kyle’s handing me the mic, he’s smiling at me oh my God.  I know I’m not the best man but I’d be honored to make a speech.  What do I even say? Uh oh, I’m standing up.  Here goes nothing…

“Hey, I don’t really have much to say, but Kyle’s been my best friend since middle school and… and I love you man.”  People clap.  Kyle’s parents are smiling at me.  Kyle nods and his wife Jessie puts her hand over her heart.

“Oh, and my name’s Gabe,” I say.  The crowd chuckles.  “Yeah, we just finished up Kyle’s bachelor party and… yikes… Uh, and, and I should say Jessie, nothing bad happened.  Like there weren’t any strippers or anything.  But yeah, bad stuff happened.  I mean first off, it barely came together.  Like Richie, the best man who you heard from earlier, yeah Richie was supposed to put the plan together but, if you know Richie… Haha, no, I’m just joking, but yeah, Richie kept procrastinating.  We had beer, brats, and no place to go since Richie didn’t book anywhere months in advance.  But so, I remembered that my Uncle Steve has this cool hunting cabin in the Ozarks, not too far out.  And I hadn’t been there since I was a kid but I remember it was a nice spot, and perfect for a bach party.  I called him up to see if we could use it and he was a little hesitant but he said it’d be okay, so long as we cleaned up after ourselves, and didn’t break anything.  We drove out and it was a really cool spot.  There were three floors, enough beds for all of us and even the bunkbed in the basement I used to sleep in, next to the locked door and the foosball table.  Well, it was a foosball table that also turned into a ping-pong table, and there was a big plasma screen TV down there.  But we mostly hung out on the main level because that had the modern TV where we could hook up some video games to play, and everything was going okay.  I said I’d stay sober in case I had to DD for an emergency, and the guys were pounding beers which, I mean, it was Kyle’s bachelor party so was to be expected, but they were pretty drunk by the evening, so we went from video games to Clue to just straight up wrestling.  I wasn’t the biggest fan of wrestling, since I didn’t want to break anything in Uncle Steve’s cabin, but the groom himself was the one to initiate it and I didn’t really want to tell him no.  So Kyle shoves Blake so hard into the couch that it pushes off to the side, and knocks a picture of my dead Aunt Rita off a table.  The picture was fine, and I was about to yell at them to cool it, but then Kyle said ‘What’s that?’ and was pointing at a brown stain under the couch, in the carpet.  Cam thought it was food, and Blake thought it was puke.  Kyle worried about it being blood, and I told them they wouldn’t have to worry about it if they quit throwing each other around.  We moved the couch back, and decided on poker.  That was going okay, til Cam lost a card in the chair cushion, and had to dig around for it.  Well, he comes up with this key, and he asks if it’s any of ours.  It wasn’t, and it wasn’t like a car key, so Cam says “Wait, do you think it’s for that locked door in the basement?”  They look at me and I say, “I don’t know.”  Before I know it they’re sprinting downstairs, and here I am yelling at them to not fall and break their necks.  Anyways, they’ve got the door unlocked by the time I get down the stairs and Kyle calls ‘Gabe, you’re going to want to see this.’  They were so drunk they didn’t even turn on a light.  I say ‘What?’  And Blake asks ‘Why does your uncle have all these mannequins in here? Without heads?’ and I said ‘I dunno, my grandfather used to own a department store.’  And Cam asks ‘What’s with all these cages?’ and I said ‘Uncle Steve used to have dogs, they got kenneled here.’  And Kyle asks ‘What’s the big table for and meathooks hanging from the ceiling and trough, and also why is this place soundproofed’ and I say ‘Because the dogs are probably loud when he’s carving up deer and curing it!’  And then Kyle says ‘You don’t think any of this is weird?’ and I say ‘It’s rude to look through other people’s locked rooms’ and I pulled the string to the lightbulb that was next to me and… yeah, at the end was the shrunken head of Aunt Rita…  So, yeah.  I can admit when I’m wrong.  Right there, I called the police, and said that I think Uncle Steve was a serial killer, and… yeah, he’s still at large right now.  I don’t know.  Yeah.  That was our weekend.”

Jessie’s sobbing.  Kyle’s looking at me funny.  He whispers to me: “You were supposed to introduce us for the first dance.”

“Oh yeah.  Uh, ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Clusky’s first dance, ‘Marry Me’ by Train!”

– Kyler Akagi

Author’s Note: “wedding speech that is too long and too personal” is meant to be a cheeky – hearing a title like that, readers may be expecting a debaucherous or embarrassing story, but over the course of the narrator’s drunken rambling, they wind up in a completely different, much darker type of story (inspired by Bluebeard!).