The tomb is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Sealed on Friday, the grave was the lifeless void that first day, so also the second, and so it began on the third. It would persist undefeated. The cold midnight hush would envelope that space until the world caved in.
Yet something stirred. The flutter of a heartbeat; nearly imperceptible. The silence reasserts its dominion for a time before another pulse briefly flickers to life. This is how it begins: a tug of war between life and death. If what the writer of the epistle says is true and to God a day is as a thousand years then decades elapsed between those first new heartbeats.
A thin line of musty air is drawn in and barely inflates the lungs. A breath more shallow than the damp dust from the first drop of rain touching the ground. The sound is a nearly inaudible hiss. A space of silence. Then another wisp of air is drawn in and then another. For some time he hangs there a breath towards the living and a silence towards the dead.
