Nails

Dust had turned the blood to rust. Lazy clouds rippled over the sky, haloed by the waning orange glow of twilight. Golgotha, the place of skulls, was barren of life. The prisoners were dead, and only one body remained unclaimed; the two Jews had been collected by mourners, who had hurried to remove the corpses before the impending religious holiday forbade them to do so.

Daniel was not interested in the body that remained. He didn't need to labour to bring the corpse down, not when such rich pickings had been left on the ground in the mourners' wake.

His nimble fingers removed the lumps of congealed flesh and splinters of bone that obscured the nail on the first crossbeam. He used a sharp-edged rock to prise it from the wood, and then moved on to the next nail, methodically repeating the same procedure. Nails often went through the crucified's flesh and were left behind. Prisoners were pinned through the small opening of bones at the wrist, because the weak flesh of the palm was likely to rip under a body's weight. Rope, too, was used to lash the condemned to the cross, even with the added security of a strong wrist bone. Crucifixion could take hours or days, and no one wanted a fellow thrashing about, unfettered and unhinged; it ruined the spectacle.

Daniel moved onto the larger of the vacant crosses. This was the one that had borne a mocking sign reading 'King of the Jews.' Two fat-headed, glistening nails, stood proud of the wood. He glanced down to the foot knot. There was no nail. He didn't expect there to be. That one usually came out when the body was lifted. The funeral party would remove it when the women washed and prepared the deceased. No matter. He applied the stone to the nails that were there. These four nails would mean his family would have their own lamb for Pesach. There would be no need to join his neighbours' table, and consequently no nagging from his wife.

In the right hands, nails were, weight for weight, as precious as gold. Daniel's hands were righter than most; heaven had blessed him with a skill to work metal. Not like the heavy-handed blacksmiths, or the practical, if unattractive, work of locksmiths. No. Daniel could work a beauty in metal that fetched a good price from Jews and gentiles alike.

He tucked the four nails into his apron and hurried home before darkness came. Tomorrow they would be bracelets -- made all the more marketable, to the superstitious Roman occupiers, by virtue of their origins.

The morning broke with the heat of a later hour. Sarah was already cooking. Daniel shook the sleep from his senses, washed, dressed and grabbed a handful of dates from the kitchen. Sarah raised an eyebrow, but knew better than to scold him. She had seen the apron and knew her husband would be busy today. He grabbed the apron, put the dates and nails in the long pocket of it, and took fire from the stove to light the kiln.

After a few hours, Sarah looked out. Daniel was lost behind a cloud of steam, transfixed on his work.

“There is food prepared,” she called. He waved her away.

When dusk threatened again, she went out with a bowl of soup and left it beside his lamp. Curious about how long he was taking, she asked, “How many nails did you find?”

His voice cracked from lack of use as he replied, “Four.”

“Four! Why all this work for four bracelets?”

Daniel looked up from the work of his numb fingers and Sarah gasped in horror. Her husband looked as if he had aged ten years. Gone was his cheery countenance, replaced with bloodshot eyes, peering out as if glazed, from behind bruised heavy lids. His cheeks were sunken and grey, and his lips, thin and parched, stretched taut when he spoke, “The third nail.”

He motioned simply to the iron between his fingers. Sarah looked at it and was amazed. Instead of the flat band with various motifs that Daniel usually made, she beheld a work so delicate and ornate that the sight of it forced her to gasp a second time. How a lump of coarse iron could have transformed into such a thing fit for a king, she couldn't fathom. The blackness of the material had been so smoothed as to create a mirror of obsidian. Intricate lines, curls, and loops, etched an alphabet that no human could speak, in a script so musical she felt moved to tears to behold it. Fear gripped her. Her heart collapsed against her ribs as she took the polishing cloth from the workbench and flung it over the newly made bracelet.

“Get rid of it!” she whispered.

Daniel looked down to the cloth over his hands, back into his wife's frightened face and nodded. “Yes. It's as if someone else made it. I won't sell it, and we can't keep it. I will take it to the tombs tomorrow.“

No more was said, but that night neither slept. It was as if the bracelet, which remained wrapped and was put into Daniel's apron, pulled all their attention to it like a magnet to a compass. Each weary thought led back to it until the cock crowed and the sun dappled the morning cloud with peach.

Daniel took the apron and walked into the still sleeping streets of Jerusalem. It wasn't long until he found himself en route to the new tombs where the hastily buried 'King of the Jews' had been laid.

He reached the place and was pushed aside by a man who rushed past him toward an open tomb. “Hey! The dead do not need you to hurry on their behalf,” he called out, only for another man to push past him and enter the tomb. The two men looked at some abandoned linen and then ran back out into the city. A woman arrived in their place and this time he had foresight to stop her. “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?”

“Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”

Daniel was about to reply that he was not the caretaker of the tombs when the world turned over and blackness enveloped him. Giddy with horror, Daniel shrunk behind his own eyes; it was as if he were a parasite in someone else's body. A body that shone like spun gold against his own dull soul. He watched the woman from behind someone else's point of view, heard his voice emanate from another's lips, and tasted honey on his tongue as his body spoke. Whatever was said seemed to satisfy the woman; she embraced him with excitement in her eyes, left reluctantly, but ran with the joyful step of a bride instead of the grief-weary step of a mourner.

In an instant the world swam back to its rightful orientation, and Daniel's mind crashed against the rock of his own skull. He looked down at his apron, removed the bracelet and placed it on the empty ledge of the tomb. He did not look back, and made his way home as soon as possible.

In the tomb an angel moved out of the shadows. It picked up the bracelet between golden fingers and smiled at the handiwork wrought on its surface. Heaven beckoned, and so it departed, taking Daniel's nail with it.

(1,245 words)