Soft target

Stephen Hunter
2:47 P.M.-3:19 P.M

The bullet hit Santa Claus beneath the left eye.

It shattered his skull, blew a large exit wound from the rear of that vessel, and drove a bright red spatter pattern across the pale satin of his throne like some sort of twisted abstract painting. Worse still, the ballistic energy unleashed an upper-body spasm that shook his hat comically askew, and it slipped off his face and caught on his ear and hung there like a large red sock.

The four-year-old girl sitting in his lap stared not so much in horror but in fascination. She understood that this was “different” but had no larger context against which to compare it. She had no acquaintance yet with the concept of horror and the human fear of seeing the body’s vaults penetrated and eviscerated, but she picked up immediately on the appropriate response from her mother, who grabbed her and started screaming as the hundreds of others clustered around Santa’s throne began to do the same.