A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  She held the sliver of glass out to me. “When I broke it, it didn’t all disappear.”

  “This is the original curse?” I asked. “From weeks ago?”

  She nodded.

  I took the glass from her. It was cool, like water in my hand, a blur across its surface as if some part of Elaine’s reflection still colored it. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

  “I didn’t want to give it up. Being invisible. Not all the way. I wanted there to be times when I could just walk around, just exist, and not have to be looked at. I thought if I kept part of it, if I just let a little of it stay, it wouldn’t be a curse anymore, and that could happen.” She closed her eyes. “Stupid, I know.”

  “Why show me now? If you’ve had that piece of it the whole time, why decide now that something is wrong?”

  “Look at yourself in the glass.”

  “Elaine, I am not using a curse to check my reflection.”

  “Pick another mirror, then. Any of them.”

  I stood before the mirror in the corner of my room. I could see everything in it. Except for my sister, and myself.

  • • •

  There are rituals. Traditions. A curse, once broken, breaks easier a second time. Death becomes one hundred years of sleep, becomes one thousand and one nights telling stories. We know what our curses are when we see them, and we know their undoing.

  But there is a catch. We may know how to break curses, but they knew how to bind us in the first place.

  • • •

  It wasn’t just our mirrors that were affected, but all of them, everywhere. No matter who gazed into them, no reflection showed. It was as if everyone had turned invisible.

  “I hate it,” Elaine said. “I look in the mirror and it’s as if I’m a ghost in my own house. And the worst part of it is, everyone looks at me now. They know the mirrors are my fault because they know what my curse looked like, and so they stare. They don’t even pretend not to. I can’t be seen when I want to be, and still, no one will stop looking.

  “I wish they knew what it felt like, to always be stared at.”

  • • •

  After I learned how to see my own curse, I discovered that I could see other people’s too. It wasn’t difficult—once you know that something is there, know the way you need to look to make it visible, it’s more effort to ignore it. Seeing the curses, understanding them, had the same sort of pleasure as fitting pieces into a puzzle. I liked the small click.

  And what I could see, I could break.

  It didn’t take long after I broke my own curse for word to get out, for people to come to me for ways of undoing when their own curses fell. My methods were of interest at parties, and besides, it was easier to listen to me explain how to slip off shoes of red-hot iron than to walk until they were worn through.

  I had seen Elaine’s curse too. Tiny mirrors, strung together like bracelets and a necklace, a matching set, reflecting only her face. I would have unstrung them carefully, one by one, rather than smashing them to pieces—bad luck to break a mirror.

  But she wanted to break the curse herself, and who was I to judge her for that? I loved my sister, so I did not tell her to be safe and to hope for good luck.

  • • •

  The piece of her curse was missing from my room. I went looking for Elaine to see if she had taken it back, to try to undo that final tiny bit herself.

  She was looking out her window, a window that was transparent, as expected. Across the wall, the edge of her—shoulder and elbow and thick curls of hair—reflected in her mirror.

  “Elaine?”

  She turned to me, and I saw myself, perfectly reflected in the mirrors of her eyes.

  • • •

  This is what it means to break your own curse. It means knowing what the curse is. Not how it manifests, not why it fell upon you and not upon some other, not what people say it means, that such a curse has chosen you. It means seeing it truly, recognizing the truth at its red and bloody heart.

  And so it means knowing your own red and bloody heart as well.

  • • •

  I repeated her name and closed my eyes. Seeing myself looking back instead of Elaine looking out was an ache.

  “You worry too much, Rose,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “How?”

  “It’s not a curse. Look.”

  It took an effort to open my eyes to meet the mirrors of hers, to confront myself, reflected back. I stepped closer, looked sideways, walked around my sister while she stood perfectly calm.

  No hook, no thorns, no sharp edges or claws. No trace of the curse that the transformation had come from.

  “They can look all they want now. All they’ll see is themselves.”

  She looked, I thought, happy. I closed my eyes again so hers wouldn’t reflect my tears.

  • • •

  We don’t talk about how the curses happen. We grow up knowing that certain curses run in families, that boys get cursed into monstrosity and girls into sleep, and we leave it at that. It is easier to imagine that our curses simply fall on us like shadows, inevitable at certain times, rather than to acknowledge the unseen truth: someone, somewhere, sets them in motion.

  If you know the heart of a curse, you can break it. If you know the heart of a person, you can give them a curse that thinks it’s a blessing.

  We don’t talk about the memories, and we imagine that silence is the final act in the curse’s disappearance. In our hearts, we know that’s not true. There is always something left.

  I hugged my sister hard. In my finger, tiny slivers of a mirror, like small biting teeth, pressed against the inside of my skin.

  All of Our Past Places

  Aoife always told me that you could go anywhere, as long as you had the right map. So when it happened, my first thought, when I let myself into her apartment after not hearing from her for three days, was this weird feeling of pride. She’d done it. She was gone.

  Then the fullness of what had happened hit me: she was gone.

  I checked, and checked again.

  Her apartment was nearly empty. The refrigerator had a couple of cartons of takeaway, whose contents ranged from edible to Dear God, and cream for her coffee. The usual.

  And then there were her maps, covering almost every flat surface in the place. The ones she had collected, the ones she was sure were the way there.

  All the maps that had St. Patrick’s Purgatory marked on them had been unrolled, tacked flat, arranged one on top of the other. I was sure there was a reason for their order and that I would have understood it if I were Aoife. Whatever the reason was, though, without her I couldn’t parse it. What I could see was that, on each of the maps, St. Patrick’s Purgatory was gone. In its place, a small hole with burnt edges.

  With the maps arranged as they were, the burned-out places were all exactly the same, as if a fire had caught, right there, and then been immediately extinguished.

  I yanked my hands away, stepped back from the table, and reminded myself that I was being ridiculous. People didn’t go to purgatory, or if they did, it was after they were dead. If they went to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, that blip on the map of Lough Derg, in Ireland, it was by taking a ferry to Station Island. They didn’t go by disappearing into a map, like some faux-charming “This is how our story begins” cold open from a crappy animated movie.

  Except. Aoife was gone. And there was a hole in each map in the place where St. Patrick’s Purgatory had been.

  The thing, of course, that’s supposed to happen in a situation like this is that you follow the other person to the underworld. You bring them back. I mean, I’d been around Aoife long enough to be familiar with the stories. I knew the rules. Someone went to the underworld, someone else came to get them, and then things didn’t work out. The end.

  Still, as far as underworlds and afterlives went, purgatory was a little different. The writers who’d claimed they’d been had also usually claimed that God had sent
them back to tell the story.

  Let’s be honest. I had no idea what sort of framework I was operating in here, but waiting around and relying on God to zap Aoife back home so she could write about her purgatorial experiences in verse as if she were Dante wasn’t a plan I could get behind.

  If there was going to be a way out of this mess, the maps would be the key. That was how things worked: if you wanted to get somewhere, you needed a map. The only problem with that was, whatever Aoife had done had erased St. Patrick’s Purgatory from them.

  • • •

  Places disappear from maps all the time. Maps from today will not include Czechoslovakia, East Germany, or the free, independent Republic of West Florida. There are reasons for these disappearances: places choose new names, wars are fought, peace is won. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. We say the borders of countries are just lines on a map, but places run deeper in us than that.

  When Aoife and I were in high school, the boundaries of Prussia had been an ongoing joke in our AP European History class. Constantly altered by reasons of conflict and history, they seemed to have been redrawn on a whim, traced one way and then the next with the specific intent of frustrating us, all those years later.

  We never gave any thought to the people in those redrawn boundaries. We never asked ourselves what happened when a country was literally erased from the map.

  • • •

  We met because of a map, Aoife and I. When we were kids, Aoife would make what she called atlases. It’s as good a word as any for them, I guess. She would take maps, any kind she could get her hands on—the kind you buy on impossible-to-fold paper at the gas station, or the blue-edged chunks of appendixes at the backs of social studies books, or, once, the surface of a globe, peeled and laid flat—and she would cut them into pieces and tape them back together.

  They were impossible to use if you were actually trying to get somewhere. The last time I checked, Mordor had no contiguous boundaries with Bismarck, North Dakota.

  She’d walk around the neighborhood with them, a cartographer examining her work. One day, she was standing at the bottom of my driveway, pencil in hand, making notes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Checking locations,” she said, looking from the plum tree in the yard back to her map and nodding.

  “Why?”

  “So the map will be right. So I can go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Wherever I want. Somewhere else.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  She looked at me, very seriously. I fidgeted under her scrutiny, raising one foot up to scratch at a mosquito bite behind the other knee.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I’m Aoife.”

  “I’m Miren.”

  After that, we went everywhere together. Until she went to purgatory.

  • • •

  So I would need a map. A map to go to purgatory, to get Aoife back. I left her pile of maps untouched, afraid that if I moved them, it might close whatever door it was she had opened.

  I went back to the beginning, to the maps Aoife had made when we were kids. Her atlases. They were carefully folded and stored inside a cedar chest that had seventeenth-century shipping routes carved on its lid.

  She had never let me help make them, those summers of fourth and fifth and sixth grade. I could go on the adventures, but she always picked the places, always was the one to craft our way there.

  I never fought with her about that. Even then, I knew she was the one of us who needed to get away.

  I opened the chest to find it packed full of maps, folded one on top of the other. Taped and stapled pages creating countries that never existed. I shook my head at myself, acknowledging the ridiculousness of what I was doing, and began unfolding them.

  They smelled like youth and summer. Like dried grass and melted ice pops that turn your tongue neon blue. Like the coconut of sunscreen and the dull plastic scent of Band-Aids. Grains of sand fell from them to the floor, and I found a piece of a crayon wrapper—one of the darker blues—and the orange-and-black wing of a butterfly, still bright.

  Mile markers of our summers, of going anywhere but here, of finding all the possible somewhere elses, of always feeling found, as I walked on those impossible quests of Aoife’s, even though I never knew from day to day where we were going.

  The one place I never walked her to was her house. “It’s better if we go to yours, Miren. We need a fixed point, like true north.”

  I had seen the bruises on her arms, heard my parents talk about Aoife’s dad when they thought I wasn’t around, so I understood, a bit, why she needed a reason to center the maps somewhere other than her house.

  “Plus, I live on Rose Avenue,” I said. “Like a compass rose.”

  “Exactly,” Aoife had said, and her smile had bloomed across her face.

  I brushed my hand across my eyes so my tears wouldn’t fall on the maps and obscure them.

  We think about maps like they are a kind of great truth. Like, if you find the right one, then you’ll know the one true way to where you’re going, and you’ll be able to get there safely, on the most direct path. The straight and narrow, that avoids both the woods and the wolves within them.

  But as anyone who’s ever gotten lost while reading a map, or stopped just short of the lake their GPS was trying to drive them into, knows, it’s never quite that simple.

  Maps are often made with small, deliberate errors, cartographers watermarking their work. Paper towns and cartographic graffiti. Sometimes the errors persist, and we navigate around someone’s imaginary land. Sometimes you just keep going, astounded when you don’t run out of road.

  • • •

  Even when she stopped making maps of her own, Aoife never lost interest in them. She was my best friend, so I adopted her obsessions as my own. It was what you did when you were eleven, twelve, and I never grew out of it. I studied cartography. I learned how to draw a compass rose, and the difference between a sidereal rose and the classic twelve-wind rose. I drew them in the pages of my notebooks, increasingly elaborate in their construction, full of symbols for the winds, whose names I wrote out in all the old languages of mapmaking.

  I got comfortable with the idea that there were monsters in the margins, and when I turned eighteen, I had “HIC SVNT LEONES” tattooed on the inside of my left wrist: “Here are lions,” the words that denoted unknown territories. Aoife went with me, and had “Ultima” written on her left ankle and “Thule” on her right. Another phrase from the edges of maps: “Past the borders of the known world.”

  Like wherever she was now.

  It was the old maps, the ones with things like “HIC SVNT LEONES” on their outermost margins and sea monsters drawn in their oceans, that had started Aoife’s obsession with purgatory. There was this map from 1492, by the cartographer Martin Behaim. It was meant to be a map of the entire world. The only thing marked on Ireland was St. Patrick’s Purgatory.

  Aoife cocked her head and traced her finger over the tiny, mostly unmarked Ireland. “Hmmm,” she said. “Why does this place matter so much?”

  That started a flurry of searching for other maps, looking for ones that had St. Patrick’s Purgatory marked. I waited for this to be a thing like her earlier obsessions, for her to begin making maps that were palimpsests of instructions to the underworld, that sent Inanna walking side by side with Persephone.

  “They call it the Forgotten County, you know,” Aoife said, bent over a stack of books and papers. “County Donegal. Where St. Patrick’s Purgatory is. Parts of it permanently depopulated during the Famine. Whole towns just disappeared from the map. Even today, it only has just over half the population it had when the Famine started.”

  Lost and disappeared. “Seems like the kind of place where you might find purgatory, then.”

  There were people who said they had. Old, old stories. Some medieval knight who actually slept in the cave on Station Island, the actual St. Patrick’s Purgatory, b
ack when you could still do that. When he woke up, he said he’d had visions of purgatory, before Dante was even born. So it’s not like Aoife was the first person to think the place really was a gateway to purgatory.

  But I am pretty sure she was the first person to think she could get there through a map.

  She scoured the internet for them, bought any map she could that had St. Patrick’s Purgatory marked, regardless of provenance or condition. Some were torn and stained, burnt. Some were barely more than fragments. She kept them all.

  “How many do you need?” I asked her.

  “Enough to have confidence in the boundaries.”

  “I’m just going to remind you again that for the money you’ve spent collecting these, you could have bought multiple trips to Ireland.” I set a plate of pasta with butter and cheese next to her, hoping she would eat.

  “I keep telling you: I’m not trying to get to Ireland. I’m trying to get to purgatory.”

  • • •

  It was like walking backward through our childhood, looking through Aoife’s maps. Not just in the sense of nostalgia, but in the sense that these maps were our compass rose, illuminating the cardinal directions of our past. I hadn’t known, then, what she was making when she put together these atlases, hadn’t realized that she was making maps of us.

  There was a map made up of all the cities we had said we wanted to live in when we grew up, choosing them only by the sound of their names: Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Kilkenny. There was another made of some of the countries we wanted to travel to, Prussia in the center because, as Aoife said, no place deserved to disappear forever. Our own city, sliced into pieces and collaged with maps of impossible places—Atlantis and Avalon.

  I studied that one carefully, looking for a border in common with purgatory, but no. Only the river Lethe, cut from its banks and spiraled on top, connecting all of them like a thread.

  Aoife was still gone.

  I marked on the calendar all the days I thought she might come back—feast days and holy days, forty days and forty nights, and other dates from other pilgrimages to the lands of the dead.