Storytime: A Week Off.

April 7th, 2010

(Since we have an entire year before it’s time for Easter, obviously this is a great time to put up an Easter story!  Stick around for our next exciting holiday-themed tale, “Christmas in February”!)

 

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.  Get killed, lie low for a while, then pop up again to spread the Good News.  The best results for all involved and I got a bit of a rest for once while everything cooled down.  A week’d be enough, I thought.  I’d been busy for thirtysomething years, I could afford to take a week off. 
The tomb was surprisingly comfy.  It was dark, and quiet, and the air was cool and not particularly stale, thanks to the overall roughness of the blocked entrance.  Nice to be out of the sun, particularly after the crucifixion.  Six hours long, but believe you me, it felt longer. 
So there I was, underground, wrapped in a linen cloth, cosy and very, very, very tired and sore like you wouldn’t believe.  A week off, possibly the most well-earned one in history.  Yes, Dad was on my case about it with the old “When-I-was-your-age-I-made-everything-and-only-rested-for-one-day-out-of-seven-and-get-a-haircut” line, but last I heard, no one nailed him to anything when he did it.  Anyways, he was just grumbling.  I was getting my rest, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to change my mind.  

The first twenty hours were the best I’d had in my life, the most restful sleep I’d had since Bethlehem.  The apocalypse could’ve gone off four feet from my head, with Death running directly over my torso, and I could’ve slept through it.  At least, that was what I thought.  That illusion went flying out the window with the first muffled thud. 
It made no impression at first.  There were a lot of things it could’ve been, all here-and-gone interruptions that made no difference.  Then came the sounds of crumbling dirt and rustling, followed by the soft pit-a-pat of feet across the floor. 
If I ignore it, it’ll go away, I told myself, as a soft and furry nose sniffed my feet.  That’s what I kept telling Paul when he came to me crying about “boo-boos.”  Then it bit me. 
I hopped bolt upright, took my own name in vain, and was confronted with the retreating backside of a rabbit as it darted back down its new burrow.  I’m not sure if you’ve ever been bitten by a rabbit, but those teeth hurt – it’d broken the skin and stained the linen.  Anyways, I found a few loose rocks and piled them up in front of the hole, then drifted back to sleep, somewhat less carefree than before.  My toe still hurt. 
Maybe I was half-expecting it, maybe the pain in my foot was keeping me from my peacefully innocent slumber, likely both, but soon I was awake again and listening to the sound of little rabbit paws scuffling at my barricade.  I smiled, rolled up in the linen, and drifted smugly towards sleep, then heard the crash and rattle of dirt.  I stopped smiling as I heard the muffled and furry thuds of the rabbit – no, rabbits.  Multiple rabbits.  There was an entire world out there for those things to burrow into, and they had to go for my tomb? 
“Leave me alone,” I said as I swung myself upright.  The rabbits twitched their noses at me.  There were four or five of them, scrawny and lean.  One of them was defecating in the corner, with an amazing lack of shame or fear.  “Out!  Out!  Go tunnel elsewhere!  Shoo!”  The rabbits were unmoved until I chucked a few pebbles near them, which startled them a little.  They hopped back down their new tunnel, which I blocked off.  With each stone I moved, I thought on how useless this had been last time, and my mind started to wander to solutions.  Surely a little miracle wouldn’t hurt, would it?  It was my week off.  I was going to take my first and possibly only real break.  It wasn’t going to be done to show off, just to make sure everyone didn’t have to deal with me being grumpy afterwards.  When I put it like that, it was like doing everyone else a favour. 
So I did it.  I passed my hand carefully over the tomb’s walls, and wherever my fingers touched solid, uncracked stone appeared.  A very thin granite shell, about as thick as someone’s little finger, but hopefully enough to keep out a few determined rabbits.  While I was at it, I turned the rabbit feces into dried figs and ate them.  I get hungry when I wake up in the middle of the night, and I believe in cleanliness. 
So I went back to bed – the slab – to dream the sleep of angels wrapped in linen, or something very much like it.  And so it was for twelve beautiful, wondrously dreamless hours right up until the moment what seemed like eighteen cubic cubits of dirt fell directly onto my face.  I was snoring a little too, and about half of it ended up in my mouth, including several novel and interesting insects.  Of course I woke up immediately (with coughing and spitting everywhere), and what did I see when I looked up above but a rabbit looking down at me from a neat little hole in the ceiling.  Leering.  It’s all in the way they wiggle their noses. 
I yelled at it and it turned tail, heading back down whatever dank little warren it had painstakingly engineered for the express purpose of tormenting me.  Cursing my lack of foresight at leaving the ceiling unprotected, I stone’d it too, and the floor for good measure.  This time my attempts at sleep were light and tense, and I practically flew off the slab twice at nothing, ears sharpened for the pitter-patter of enormous hoppy feet.  I could practically smell them.  When I did manage to succumb to exhaustion over nerves, dreams were waiting for me – especially that unpleasant one about when I was twelve and didn’t look where I was swinging the hammer while building a bench.  My left thumb is still crooked.  I was pretty sure the hammer hadn’t been bigger than I was, or covered in rusty spikes and glowing white-hot.  But there it was, sliding down from above towards my soft, unsuspecting fingers, one hand unable to release it, the other unable to move.  And when it hit, it hit with a bang so loud that I woke up in a flash, yelling.  And the first thing that met my eyes was the hammer, which was lying on the floor from where it had fallen partway up the wall, where a crude hole had been chiselled.  A pair of rabbits were in it, watching me with avaricious glee. 
“Go AWAY!” I yelled at them, and they did.  The hammer, on examination, appeared to have been made by crudely shaping a cobblestone and binding it to a branch with a leather thong taken from an elderly pair of sandals.  I sighed. 
There were exactly two people out there that would do this.  One of them had complained about my wanting to sleep in before.  Still, I supposed I could give dad credit; a plague of rabbits was a good step down from the old days.  In modern times, smiting just wouldn’t cut it, I’d told him over and over, and despite all the complaining I thought he’d been making real progress.  Unless this was a pointed way of informing me exactly what he thought of my opinions on that matter. 
“The frogs weren’t much better, dad” I told the world at large – and by extension, him.  “Frogs?  Really? I mean, there were a lot of them, but they were frogs.  Bunnies aren’t much less silly.”  Dad declined to comment on this. 
This time I didn’t even try to sleep, declining both the futility of it and the likelihood of further, more horrible dreams.  I just sat down and waited.  They came to me within the next hour or four, chiselling new holes in the walls as they arrived, filing in silent rows and moving out of the way for new arrivals with ordered precision.  By the time they finished pouring in, the entire tomb bar my slab was covered in a furry carpet of rabbits. 
What I said next was not my best moment, but please, give me a little charity here.  I’d been woken up three times, bitten, had dirt dumped in my mouth, and suffered through the vivid re-imagining of childhood trauma, and all on my one week off before it could even get started.  I was a little grumpy and very tired and my back, feet, and palms all still hurt from the crucifixion, so I was very much uninclined to smile peacefully, speak in parables, or do any preaching. 
“Would you lot kindly knock it off, please?” I asked.  “I’m trying to sleep.”
My audience twitched their tiny little rabbit noses as one, two, three times in perfect harmony.  Then they rose up in a clotted horde and swarmed over my slab, a writhing, hopping morass of kicking legs and wobbling ears.  

The next few hours were a bit of a confused blur.  The rabbits didn’t seem to have a solid goal beyond “go berserk.” Even though they’d had me pinned at the very start they abandoned their apparent plan immediately in favour of leaping about the tomb at random, vaulting over and around each other like a basketful of spilled pomegranates.  Rabbits piled up in towering stacks that reached near to the ceiling, toppling over onto rabbits below in slow motion.  Rabbits frenziedly tore at the walls to reveal waiting tunnels filled with more rabbits.  Rabbits were everywhere – rabbits copulating, rabbits defecating, rabbits hopping up and down on the spot with manic energy, and rabbits sitting quietly and twitching their noses.  The last ones were the most worrying, because you could never tell when they’d decide to be one of the other kinds, as I discovered when one squatting directly on my head suddenly wanted to burrow. 
Of course, I wasn’t exactly sitting there and taking this lying down, beyond the first couple of minutes when I was pinned directly to the slab by the sheer monstrous weight of furry little bodies.  But the moment I had my hands free, I was up and moving, grabbing rabbit after rabbit and shooing them out.  All I had to do was make them want to go back home, which was fine and easy and just took one hand and one second per rabbit, but there was the little niggling issue of grabbing ahold of them in the first place.  Also, there were rather a lot of them and more streaming in at every moment.  So I had to seal off the tunnels, which now took up more of the walls than the walls themselves, and that was no picnic either. 
By the time I sent the last rabbit on its way and sealed its burrow, I was more exhausted than I’d been when I got into the tomb in the first place.  I collapsed onto that slab and my well-tattered linen shroud as though it were the comfiest mattress in an emperor’s palace, which didn’t serve me well, seeing as more rabbits had undermined it and it promptly collapsed in on itself and dumped me into the floor, where they mobbed me.  

Getting out of that took a lot more time, swamped as I was with furry little creatures whose evil outstripped the adversary himself.  Repairing my slab took even longer.  By this point, I’d decided that I’d be able to sleep through anything, and resolved that no matter what happened, I’d just ignore it. 
I woke up some time later to ominous silence, and, risking the opening of a single eye a half-crack, came eyeball-to-eyeball with a solitary rabbit, which stared right back.  Two mutually unblinking minutes passed, and then I’m sad to say that I lost my temper.  There was wailing and gnashing of teeth and frantic attempts to grab ahold of it to do some sort of violence.  I’m eternally thankful that the little furry bugger was fast enough to get away; I wouldn’t have wanted that on my conscience.  At the time, however, this was nothing but the last straw in a haystack made entirely of last straws, each laster than its predecessor. 
“Fine,” I told dad.  “Fine!  You win!  You always win!  I’m up!  I’m awake!  I couldn’t be any more awake if I tried and I swear I’ll never be able to sleep again!”  I kicked the slab as hard as I could, ignored the crippling pain in my toes, then shoved the rock out of the tomb’s mouth.  “One week!  Just one week, was that so much?  Was it too much?  Fine! Three days, most of them spent wide-awake and battling endless streams of bunnies?  All right then!  Three days it is!”

 

Despite all this, I got the last laugh in the end.  The Easter rabbit was his idea, but I was the one who suggested making them edible.  Every year, I receive a beautiful serenade of crunching chocolate heads, and it almost makes up for the whole affair. 

Almost.

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