Easter

Goodman and the Master are seated in the galley by the great glass window, breaking their fast.

“Goodman,” the Master says, eyeing a piece of melon on his fork. “Tell me again why the market is closed today.”

The Master’s familiar is chewing on a particularly stubborn lump of bread. Finishing, he sips wine to wash it down.

“I am afraid there are conflicting narratives about the import of this day, my lord.” This confuses the Master. “Pray repeat thyself more clearly, Goodman.”

“Some say this day has import. Some say it has none.”

“I see,” the Master says. “And what do you say.”

“I say it is Sunday.”

“Like any other Sunday.”

“Indeed.”

“So you mean to say that today has no import.”

“No, Master. It has import, but only the import of a typical Sunday. Or, perhaps, less so, as the market is closed.”

“Mmm.”

Goodman nods.

The Master continues. “What of these…import people. What do they say?”

Goodman sighs and casts his eyes briefly to the ceiling. “They are incorrigible, my lord.”

The Master says nothing.

“The…import people, as you call them, speak lovingly and homo-erotically of a man long dead.”

The Master tries to work it out like it is a riddle. “A king?”

“They call him a king, yes. King of kings, if I am precise.”

The Master raises his eyebrows, clearly impressed. “Well what is amiss with that? I am often homo-erotic.”

Goodman tilts his head. “Touché, Master.” He pauses. “You are.”

“So what if I were to be homo-erotic for this man? This ‘king of kings’?”

“Oh no, Master. That would be a terrible mistake.”

“Pray explain.”

Goodman shifts in his seat, knowing a lecture is about to burst forth. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

Goodman lets out a lot of air. “If you wish,” he says, before taking a preparatory sip of wine. “A couple thousand years ago, a young girl and a young boy made sweet young love together under a staircase or something, and the girl was soon found to be having a belly.” Goodman clears his throat. “In terror that she or he might be whipped in the square for their crime against God, and realizing the impossibility of hiding her girth, they concocted a fictitious version of events to explain the pregnancy—nothing short of insemination by a Godly ghost penis for the express purpose of the arrival of the Creator’s firstborn son upon the earth, or as I like to call it, The First Cumming.”

“That sounds ridiculous, Goodman.”

“The young boy and the young girl had a difficult time convincing people of their narrative, and they were expelled from the land and the girl was forced to empty her womb into a pile of straw next to a shitting donkey.”

“No.”

“Yes. And that might have been the end of the story, but the boy—“

“The baby?”

“Yes. He grew up to be an even more ambitious liar than his parents! By the time there was nary a hair under his arm, he was swindling geriatrics out of their tithing coins in the temple with the self-same story his mother and father had told! And when he was fully grown, well, that’s when he formed a gang and rattled the government so much with his wild ideas of love that they nailed him to a tree between a pedophile and a pick-pocket.”

The Master is reeling in his chair. “Well I’ll be.”

Goodman nods, and has some more wine.

“And that is why the market is closed? Because they killed him?”

Goodman shakes his head and sets down his goblet.

“On the contrary, my lord. The market is closed because after they entombed him, he came back to life.”

“Codswallop.”

Goodman shrugs. “Once a year, faithful followers of that charlatan close down their shops to go looking for him.”

The Master squints. “It is a lie, Goodman.”

“It is what the import people believe, my Lord. I have only relayed it to you.”

The Master leans back, mystified by the story.

Goodman wrings his hands under the table. It has been two thousand years but they still smart from time to time.