Frankenplot: Dark is the light.

The wind tried to bury him. Hunted and haunted him, but the desert silence was the food and drink he needed. If he hadn’t been so tired. Squinted and shut his eyes, he’d have seen that the devil was no longer walking up and down the world but had drawn closer.

‘Son of Lazarus, the devil whispered. ‘How far have you come and where are you going?’

Her neighbours had long forgotten. Only God remembered her name. ‘Arok,’ the old widow cried.

She spoke in the archaic patois of the lanes. Birthed in the rough slant of mud huts and stone, following well-worn paths and syllables of the poorest that rose and fell sharply into nothingness. He too had grown into the old Aramaic that rolled from throat to ear like heavy breathing. Consonant heavy. Commands given to goats and donkeys. Kicks to feral dogs and his bare feet when he folded himself into a corner and slept. The kind that knew the taste of dust and to hide their mouths when they fell on the sweetness of figs. Not the high-fluting words of his parents or the synagogue.

She needed not raise her voice. Her whisper more a thing of cloth than last breaths. A sound swallowed by the markers of low stone walls.

He saw the dusty pestle in which she’d beaten the last of the grain.

‘Waiting again?’ said the devil. ‘A lifetime of waiting. For guests to come. For gods to come. For the alpha and omega to sit next to the beggar and for water to become wine. That takes a curved eternity of time. 

Darkness will call you. Recognise in its longing for in yourself for lost and lonely days. For those other places, the quiet place, the hidden spaces, and here-in-the sandy deserts where what will be will be. Amen to the blankness. The inflammation of buried senses.  Drink it in. And how it sets your soul free.

Son of Lazarus, be not afeared of the dark. Because it can be your friend. Even to the world’s end.’

Lazarus arose with weightless grace and spoke to multitudes of lost souls and praised his saviour, the Prophet from Galilee and called him the Messiah.

Lazarus’s hand had reached out and clutched the wrist of another lost soul in the tomb. The beauty was in his touching beyond the veil. Life and death buried beneath the rocks of Bethany and the mask of scented aloe and myrrh. Hannah had been her name, which meant God anointed with grace or favour. Risen again. These things she carried in her heart. And her steady gaze. 

Their child they named Chaim, Life, because Life had come from a moment borrowed from the infinite.

The Pharisees looked on and looked for ways to make Lazarus small and to put out the pillars of flames that engulfed them night and day, so that people followed and hung on every word about the false prophet from Galilee.

A voice rootless with rage. Joined by other cursing voices.

The widow’s large teeth, her whole face square and dull. Her bowed head and Death has his hand on her shoulder.

Chaim stepped closer and let her trace his face with her fingers for the last time. ‘Handsome,’ she whispered. ‘Too smart they say. ‘Arok,’ she cried. ‘Flee to faraway places beyond the desert, because they’ll come for you before the light.’ 

Her hand found his. Fingers curled with age, closing over the pale skin of his wrist. The touch was a tether and a shove—warm, but urgent, the pressure of someone who had nothing left to lose. He felt the grit under her nails, the faint scent of lavender. He pressed his thumb into the hollow of her palm.

‘Mother,’ he said. Her feet had taken him away from the mob that had stoned his father and mother. Her arms had held him and comforted him. She had given him life.  

‘Arok.’

He brushed the dust from his feet at the door. Night still as a painting. His stomach knotted but as he walked further and further, he felt a loosening in his stride.

Near sunrise, he met a girl fetching water from the stream, for the well had dried up. She did not see him. Her concentration fixed on carrying the life-giving liquid. He recognised kinship in her undyed and patched clothes, her unlaboured gait which came with youth and a wariness of the path and the journey could not rub away. She moved the clay jug from a loose circle of cloth in her hair to her hip with an assured movement on a rocky incline

The constant name calling to carry this and that he too had endured. To move faster. To eat less. To do more. Hair tugging. The twisted arms. The burns from the grate. The beatings with sticks or until knuckles were bruised.

You refused to cry. Motionless and silent as the starry sky, which infuriated them more. 

You would not beg. Neither would you bend. You would tuck your knees up under your chin to give yourself room to breathe in dusty corners. Sneak away from the hubbub in rocky places. Raise your voice like a crow to call the Prophet from Galilee and thank him for giving you life, just as you had been taught. But he never came. 

The devil leaned in. He had seen you watching the girl. Her hidden beauty. And the troubled disturbance wrought in you. The thirst. And not for the water she carried but how she carried herself. The gold she carried in the beat of her heart, which you’d have torn away like a necklace and thrown away, until she glanced at you and half-smiled and you almost called out her name. And wondered if she’d reply.

The devil leaned in further and blew into your inner ear. ‘You can have her as your Jezebel and no one will tell. Just dedicate the firstborn child for a little while. A pact. The shadow that carries the beat of life will grow strong and such a leader can do no wrong. Men will follow and nations will fall. Even the Romans. The temple will grow tall. You will be the parent of all.’