It is accomplished!

I’ve been working for more than ten years on my first long-form piece of narrative fiction and I just finished it yesterday. Worked on it all morning (mostly on formatting issues), took a break to go to the dentist for yet more compulsory dental calisthenics, then came home and worked till I dropped. By the time I dropped, it was finished.

At least finished enough for me to retire it and think about doing something else with my scant free time. Like learning to play the guitar more good, or speak passable English. Maybe get to know my family...

I’m sure some grammatical, punctuation and formatting mistakes remain but my feeling right now is “fuck them.” It’s all there, just the way I want it, and if somebody wants to edit it into perfection someday, they have my blessing.

Although it took me ten+ years to complete, in the interim I also finished a 3-hour Captain America screenplay and a 16-hour miniseries about the second half of the XVIII Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

But this is the real deal – the thinly-veiled autobiography that most first-time authors start with. Strictly for the purposes of satisfying my own vanity, I will present the prologue below in its entirety then never mention the subject again.

Finally, I’d like to thank Tucson, Arizona, for scarring me so completely and effectively as a child growing up there that I spent more than ten years trying to write my contempt for it out of my system.

And now, the Prologue:

The sun had slipped almost completely behind the Judean mountains to the west, and most of the crowd had gone home. Crucifixions, even of local celebrities, had begun to lose their drawing power by the time the Romans and the city elders sentenced the carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth to hang from a cross.

The Roman crucifixion was not a meticulous affair. Like the Romans themselves, it offered just enough rote and ritual to appear a legitimate bureaucratic function, while its application was often as not sloppy and open to wide-ranging interpretation.

Crucifixion offered its victims a generous array of ways to die, and different victims succumbed to different causes. Blood loss. Internal bleeding. Head trauma. Suffocation. If one withstood everything else, the suffocation took them.

No one walked away from a Roman crucifixion.

That day there were three unfortunates lined up along the crest of the hill overlooking the drab Judean countryside. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and storm clouds were boiling up out of the west. All three condemned hung with their heads down in the thin rain, their long matted hair hugging their purpled, bloody faces. The heads of crude iron nails extruded from their wrists and feet, and all three were fighting for every remaining breath.

The heartiest of the trio croaked out through cracked lips to the man hanging at his side, “I’m Demas. That’s me mate Gestas on the other end. He’s the troublemaker.”

Gestas glanced over but said nothing. It didn’t seem he could spare the effort.

Demas continued, “An honest man can’t earn a living wage, then when he’s forced to nick from the temple granary to feed his family… this is the end of it.”

The stranger in the middle either didn’t hear or was too weak from blood-loss to muster a response.

“Gestas, tell our new mate what they got you for.”

This opportunity proved worth the effort. Gestas spat out, as best he could through swollen lips and missing teeth, “For being a Jew, trying to live peaceably in his own homeland.”

One of the guards noticed that, and with a half-hearted scowl, thrust his spear in and out of Gestas’ shriveled belly.

Gestas screamed in pain but seemed to smile at the same time, as if reveling in this validation of his hatred for his tormentors.

The guard wandered the couple steps back to his post and grumbled to his companion about the rain. He struggled to pull his cowl up over his helmet while his companion laughed at his clumsiness.

Demas turned to the second man.

“Hey. Hey…”

The man in the middle crooked his head slightly toward his inquisitor, but said nothing.

Demas persisted, “What did they get you for?”

The man in the middle seemed to slip even further down on his painful perch. With an effort, he flung his wet mop of hair onto his shoulder, revealing a face so badly beaten that it made Gestas’ wounds look superficial by comparison. He opened his near-toothless mouth to show where the top of his tongue had recently been either chopped or chewed off. His eye that remained, however swollen over it was, was clear and held no self-pity.

In spite of himself, Demas looked away.

After a while of grim silence, Demas turned back to the man and said, “You must be that preacher I heard about. That healer. The vandal. The heretic. You had to have known this would be where you’d wind up, didn’t you?”

The man ignored him this time and concentrated instead on the effort of drawing his next breath.

Demas glanced over at the guards again, then continued in a lower voice, “How come you don’t miracle yourself away off this son of a bitch? And take me with you.” Demas glanced over at Gestas, then back at the man hanging next to him. “The two of us, you and me – we could still make it!”

The man looked over at Demas, searching his face to see if he was being mocked.

Demas averted his eyes and stammered, “I used to watch you preach, whenever I could.” He paused, before deciding to continue. “I saw you cure a cripple once, right there in front of my eyes, a mate of mine the whole of my life. After that, I, uh… guess I followed you at a distance, you know. My career was um, at odds with some of your, uh, ideals – but I never got tired of hearing you speak. I always felt… good listening to you talk.”

The second man stared at him a moment longer, then his head sagged forward.

The rain drizzled on a while longer uninterrupted before Demas mumbled to himself, “Sure wish I could hear you talk now…”

Some thought the carpenter would use his uncanny abilities to rescue himself at the end, but for reasons that were lost with him, he never did.

In the end, he died like any man. Alone. Afraid.

I stood at the foot of the center cross in the drizzling rain, as close as the disinterested guards would allow an ussauming young Jewish boy to approach. Only one other remained in the rain and mud at the foot of Golgotha with me; by any honest account, the man who should have been hanging on that center cross, the criminal Barabbas.

Or Barabbas the patriot – depending upon whom you asked.

The rain, mud-red with the dying man’s blood, ran in rivulets down the sodden earth. I had to step aside to get out of the way. My feet weren’t fit to be washed in it.