by Alexander Sharov
An overcurious Attic rat once lurked around the winery, collapsed into an urn, and precipitately choked to death on wine. On the ensuing day the urn was forwarded to Caesarea Maritima and loaded onto a vessel. A bolt of lightning arced into the vessel during the tempest, fire broke out, and the ark sank midway en route from Jaffa to Piraeus. In 3694 the amphora with mummified crystallized mass was elevated, and the fossilized rat was whittled out of it. The architectonics of the gnawer’s volatile memory were recreated through calculative scanning, and with the aid of the sixteen-dimensional emulator of lower mammals’ sensory perception, relevant output was visualized. It transpired that the rat, which so (in)felicitously floundered into the amphora, six hours heretofore had witnessed the interrogation of Christ by Pontius Pilate.
In 5118 a retro-computing mission fortuitously unearthed clandestine findings on the matter. Regretfully the then-retrieved data chip of the acclaimed web NN-4 was almost utterly damaged, and in the final takeaway, a chunk of the index, fragments of the colloquy, and two flashback snapshots (from amongst the total of two million) were displayable. The less-scathed snapshot features a sessile gentleman bearing the insignia of the Roman viceroy. The optics are extraordinarily viewer-unfriendly: the nether-fringe view. An elephantine sandaled foot is conspicuous; a disproportionately dwarfish head has a comparatively hypertrophied jaw; a ringed hand rests on his lap. Opposite stands Christ— a swarthy Levantine of forty or so, with a princely gown, aquiline nose, wispy beard, and bloated cheeks. The snapshot is focused on the ring (tinted splotch), an ostentatiously flamboyant one (supposedly), the artifact riveting the rodent’s alertness this particular second. The latter snapshot is severely blurred. Pilate is scarcely discernible. Something is spoken by Christ as He gestures with his hand straight at the rat. A hexapod (hypothetically, Blatta orientalis) is zigzagging across the foreground. The snapshot is semantically eccentric. Ostensibly, the instant of retraction of awareness from the insect to the background is videoed. Apparently, the rat yearned to devour the cockroach but was deterred by an outcry.
Extant gleanings from the talk are swappable in plain, text-only file format. There is no knowing who accosts whom. The duologue was pursued in Latin bureaucratese of the first century AD, and the respective sayings were loosely rendered into eidetic English. Altogether nineteen utterances were de-garbled:
1. The issue of sponsorship will now be dealt with.
2. Let us arrange thus.
3. It is opined that your henchmen should be eliminated.
4. Where is your acolyteship?
5. Thou wilt become shorter by the head.
6. Where is the baksheesh?
7. We shall now fix the issue of miscasting.
8. We shall smite on the hands.*
9. To vilipend and denigrate.
10. To tweak the agenda.
11. Agility and sustainability of prosecution.
12. To the steering committee? The Sun is surer to prostrate on the Earth!
13. Speciously highlighted.
14. We shall inspect this proposal in due season.
15. Under the orthodox aura, unction for sore eyes.
16. The chancery rat.
17. Wring the neck off the edacious bourgeois rat.
18. The sycophant must be hung on a rope’s end moistened in asinine urine.
The last, nineteenth statement was disambiguated as Christly:
19. I am not to be awed any more. Altogether I am clueless as to what Your August Lordship is speaking about. I shall be risen and linger in perpetuity. My father, Lord, my God willed it so!
*Herein is obscure whether literally or allusively.
About the Author
Alexander Sharov was born in Ukraine. He enrolled at Dnipro National University where he was majoring in Creative Writing and minoring in Psychology. He writes and translates into Russian, Ukrainian and English.