Rolling Away The Stone

Nathan was 100 percent done with Jericho.

When he'd left Jerusalem Friday morning, he'd been full of pep and vigor, ready to take his first break of longer than a day since the Lord knew when. The Nathan who lay in his bed at the Right Thyme Inn listening to his neighbors fuck loudly for the second night in a row felt a little differently about things.

He was allegedly trying to get some rest, but getting rest here was harder than at home- and not just because of the woman screaming HARDER through the wall, which shook alarmingly, raining down clay dust at every knock of the bedpost on the other side.

First of all, it was hotter here, the damp from the nearby river creating a thin coat of sweat on his skin that made him feel constantly disgusting. This atmosphere was also apparently paradise for mosquitos: he'd been bitten so many times he'd lost count, and he was 97 percent certain he had contracted some type of fatal, tragic disease.

He'd tried, he really had, imagining what his mother would say if she could witness him. Nathan, she'd say, shaking her head in the way of a wise woman who's tried all she can in a hopeless case, I don't know where you got that anxiety of yours, but if you don't learn to relax a little you'll never have a day of fun in your whole life.

In a valiant attempt to both appease and slay this hologram of his mother that lived rent-free in his mind, Nathan had tried to be chill. He'd walked around town, lightly sightseeing, though he'd stopped this activity when a particularly pushy merchant started trying to haggle with him over a piece of pottery he'd looked at for five seconds. "I don't want it," he'd tried to say, but the man merely gabbled at him in Greek. Nathan didn't understand Greek, and the merchant clearly didn't understand Aramaic, because the crazy guy followed him past about fifty other market stalls, gibbering and hopping around with that vase held aloft. He was fast for an older guy, and Nathan had to power-walk to lose him. In the sweat and fuss, he became up to 33 percent certain the man might assault him with his own product if he caught up.

When he finally shook the guy off, he was so disgusting and sweaty that he decided to take the waters at a nearby natural spring. Very touristy, very in-vogue. But it appeared that everyone under the sun had had the same damn idea, and finding a peaceful spot was no task for the weak. In the end, he spent maybe 30 minutes standing in water up to his waist trying not to listen in on a family's Passover drama while on the shore, a donkey stared relentlessly into his eyes as if to intimate that it wanted a word with him ASAP.

Nathan was a manual laborer and plenty proud of his body, but the donkey still got to him: there was no shortage of judgment in its dull, dead eyes. After a time, he gave up on it altogether. The collective weight of the dumb beast's disapproval and the man closest to him screaming about his brother fucking his wife somewhere right now collided into a heap on top of him and suddenly he found it very hard to breathe. Deciding there was no worse fate than having a panic attack in the middle of a public spring, he waded out rapidly and got into his tunic, belt and sandals still wet. The clothing clung to him as he walked, dripping, away from the crowd. The donkey turned stolidly to watch him leave.

On the road back to his inn, Nathan crossed paths with one of those supposed foretold prophets, preaching up a storm in the afternoon sun. Those guys were a dime a dozen these days, and the proof was in the pudding: he seemed to be having a hard time attracting a crowd. Nathan was walking past him when he nearly tripped over a goat, and because his luck was apparently nonexistent, the holy man accosted him and shoved some 'healing figs' into his hand. Nathan hadn't had much to eat so he munched on them on his way back to the inn, only to immediately become concerned that they tasted off and were not actually figs at all, but large insectoid creatures stuck together, or some dense, pelletized form of poison. For the next three hours and 47 minutes, he lay on the floor of his room waiting to die while the apparition of his mother sighed and shook her head in the corner.

You're thirty years old, Nathan.

And that's all I'll ever be, he thought dramatically, feeling his eyes moisten.

Now, having mercifully survived the figs, Nathan lay in bed wondering if his neighbors might be the guy from the pool’s brother and wife. It was a small world, after all. That sounded like the beginning of a nice song.

He was also wondering whether it wasn't too late to cut the whole trip short a bit and skedaddle. He was supposed to start home Sunday afternoon but suddenly Sunday afternoon seemed a long way off. It's probably too late to travel, Nathan rationalized, turning over in bed. What if he was burglarized, or worse, eaten by some large animal? The woman on the other side of the wall screamed EXCAVATE ME! to her ardent lover, and suddenly the risk felt worth it.

It was around midnight when Nathan left the inn with his paltry bag of work tools on his back. It contained a small hoe, a spade and a pruning knife. Though not strictly necessary, he'd brought them with him so he could go straight to work when he got back without having to go home first. As he clanked over the dark, rocky terrain, thinking bitterly of the refund he would not be getting from the inn manager, their presence consoled him a bit. If someone approached him, there was enough weight in the bag to knock them unconscious with a good swing.

Nathan was a gardener for a man named Joseph of Arimethea, or as he was more commonly known, Joe. Joe was plenty nice for a rich guy, so long as you didn't fuck up too badly. The ‘so long as’ portion was crucial. His last gardener set an olive tree on fire and Joe killed him and buried him under his house. At least that's what Simon the street beggar said, and Nathan had no reason not to believe Simon, who liked to walk with him on the way to work every morning and tell him various bits of trivia.

It was this anecdote Nathan uncomfortably remembered as he walked home. He'd left the garden, a modest little thing, in the care of his one coworker, Levi the Tree Guy. Levi was cocky and dumb in equal measure and had an unnerving habit of calling every woman he took a liking to 'Mary' while waggling his eyebrows at them suggestively. It was weird enough before Nathan found out that Levi's own mother was named Mary; now he was 98 percent certain this signified a morbid dysfunction of some kind.

Even though Levi was generally a pain in the ass, he was good for some things: namely, taking excellent care of all the trees, as his name suggested, though this often came at the expense of all herbs and flowers in the vicinity, which he seemed to have a blatant distaste for. He’d also be remiss not to mention that Levi the Tree Guy had excellent, bronzed pectorals that Nathan was fond of watching move under the glistening sweat on his chest when he worked.

He spent the rest of the trip back to Jerusalem in the pitch dark vividly imagining all the horror that might lie in wait on his return, pausing only to shake the pebbles out of his sandals. What if Levi’d left the garden gate open and a goat had eaten all the thyme and mint that had just begun to shoot through the early spring soil? What if he'd clean forgot he was supposed to be taking over his superior's shifts? What then? Joe trusted Nathan, something he took great pride in. He'd been head gardener for years- a whole ten, in fact! What if, without Nathan's watchful eye, the man had started taking passing 'Mary's into one of the freshly constructed family tombs to fuck their brains out? Joe trusted him so much at this point, in fact, that when he'd nervously brought up this little trip, the man had instantly okayed it, entrusting arrangements for his coverage would be worked out by his smart, totally competent head gardener.

By the time he'd reached the edge of town, Nathan had already resolved to check in on the garden just to set his mind at ease. It was still dark- dawn would probably be another hour in coming- so no one need know he'd been. Besides, he'd be passing Joe's place anyway on his way home; it only made sense.

"It's not like I'm going out of my way to soothe my anxiety here," he said aloud. "Perfectly normal to want to check on things. Responsible, even."

Thus resolved, Nathan cut down the side road that would take him to Joe's sprawling stone house. When he'd got within a few feet of the garden fence, he felt a sinking in his gut that felt a little like indigestion.

The gate was hanging open, and even from here Nathan could see the grass and shrubs were tamped down and disorderly, as if someone- or several someones-had repeatedly come and gone.

"That son of a bitch," he growled. Grappling in his sack of tools, he pulled out his pruning knife and brandished it like a deadly weapon before him as he traversed the dark garden. The desecration was not as widespread as he feared; most of it seemed to be concentrated in an area right in front of one of the family tombs, the entrance of which someone had blocked with a large boulder.

"What the actual fuck," Nathan said, less afraid now than angry. He felt 87 percent sure that Levi the Tree Guy had indeed been using this place as some kind of fuck fort. Not to mention, he'd thoroughly crushed all of the lilies Nathan had spent hours planting on Thursday. Shaking his head, he braced against the stone and rolled it aside. He was dusting his hands off when his tired brain registered what he was seeing inside.

Nathan screamed.

The sound echoed in the small garden. He clapped both hands over his mouth and stood there, in the midst of his destroyed lilies, hyperventilating.

There was a fucking dead man in there.

At first Nathan thought it was Levi the Tree Guy, that some angry husband had accosted him at work and hid the body after a fit of regrettable passion. But upon creeping closer, he saw he was wrong. The dead guy did look a good deal like his coworker, but he was thinner and looked a little older, maybe around Nathan's age. He'd also been crucified.

Nathan stared at the fresh wounds on the man's hands and chest, and started to feel a little woozy. A criminal, then. Someone buried a fucking criminal in my boss's garden while I was on vacation. I am so, so fired. For once his mother's judging voice seemed to think he had a point, because it did not reply.

Nathan began to pace back and forth. "Oh, this is bad. This is very, very bad." It wasn't his fault, but Joe wouldn't care whose fault it was- it was his responsibility as head gardener. Nathan wasn't a particularly pious man, but in that moment, he prayed to God for a way out of this. "Please," he said, "I'm too young to be buried under Joe's floor."

God apparently agreed with him, for at that moment an idea came to him. It was still dark, though not for long. If he worked fast enough, he could buy himself some time by moving the man somewhere he wouldn't be instantly found.

The dead guy was wrapped in linens that looked so nice they could've been the property of Joe himself. After much dithering, Nathan removed these and folded them on the bench along the tomb wall then bit his lip, bending over the corpse and gripping its shoulders. The man was stiff as a board. Nathan shuddered. Push past it, bitch, he commanded himself. This isn't amateur hour.

Dead people were heavy, and Nathan quickly broke a sweat dragging the man by his ankles over the ground. By the time he reached his destination, he was bent over, panting.

The compost heap was located in the shadiest corner of the garden, obscured by a cluster of fig trees. After digging out what he thought was a suitable space, Nathan dragged the dead guy in and began to cover him. Light tinged the horizon and he wheezed, fighting against a persistent stitch in his side. He covered the head last, and as he did, he felt like the corpse's blank eyes were staring up at him accusingly.

"Sorry, guy," Nathan muttered. "Nothing meant by it. You're just in the wrong place at the wrong time." He wondered if the man had family, anyone looking for him. Crucifixion wasn't only for the worst types; he could be an unfortunate slave. Sometimes the Romans were just salivating to make an example of someone. He forked the last heaping pile of earth over the man and patted it down with his spade. "No hard feelings, okay?" he said to it.

A scream split the air, and Nathan jumped, almost falling over onto the makeshift grave. For a half second, he was 99 percent sure that the sound issued from the dead body itself, that it was about to rise up from the dead and wreak vengeance on him for disturbing its rest. But no- it was a woman's voice, and it was coming from back through the trees, by the tomb he'd just left.

Fuck, Nathan thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It was fast becoming the word of the day.

This lady, whoever she was, was full-on bawling, and the longer she went on, the more he became concerned he hadn't done the right thing at all by tampering with this random dead guy. When suddenly the screaming went silent, Nathan crept slowly through the trees and peered at the open tomb. No one was there; the gate was still swinging as though someone had left in a hurry.

He didn't waste any time; who knew how long it would be until someone was back? He ran out the gate, for once not bothering to close it behind him. Thankfully there wasn't anyone on the road in the direction he was going. No one will know it was me, he attempted to assure himself, walking home fast to beat his incoming nervous diarrhea. I'm not even supposed to be back until this evening, and no one saw me after all. Not to mention, people steal corpses all the time; how much difference can one more missing body possibly make?

.

Levi flexed his muscles, checking out them guns, as he tended to do on the way in to work. He'd been getting some pushups in now that that twitchy Nathan guy wasn't always hanging over his shoulder. The guy took gardening way too seriously, like it was his life's work or something. Seriously weird. He'd be back tomorrow morning from his little vacation. He hoped the guy didn't have FOMO, because he'd missed a hell of a lot. What with the prophet dude being crucified and all those people- even his boss- clamoring over him, swearing he was the real deal. Lodging the supposed son of God in his own personal garden had to have some serious social perks for old Joe. Levi didn't know what he thought of all that noise himself: the guy looked regular, kind of like a less hot version of himself if he was being honest. But people were pretty psyched about it all the same, and he could picture Nathan having a coronary over missing out.

The moment he pushed through the garden gate, he heard a silent weeping. A woman was sitting on the ground, leaning over a rock and crying in front of the tomb, which lay empty, the stone rolled away from its face.

Well I'll be damned, Levi thought. Bastard actually rose up and walked away like they said.

Just then, the woman seemed to register his presence; she looked up at him, her reddish-brown hair falling around her face fetchingly. He vaguely recognized her as one of Joe's rich friends.

"Sir," she said, "if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him."

Levi didn't know about all that. All he knew was you didn't look a gift regulation hottie in the mouth. He stepped towards her, grinning and waggled his eyebrows up and down once- his signature move.

"Mary."