A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  The statue from Brian was a carnival fantasy among articulated skeletons in shadow boxes, shivered bones set at precise angles of flight.

  Her own bones ached as if wings mantled beneath the surface of her skin and longed to burst forth from her back.

  The canvas before her was enormous, six feet in height and half again as wide, the largest she had ever painted. On it, a murmuration of starlings arced and turned across a storm-tossed sky.

  Among the starlings were other birds. Birds of vengeance, storm-called, and storm-conjuring. The Erinyes.

  The Kindly Ones.

  More terrible than lightning, they harried the New York skyline.

  Cramps spasmed Maeve’s hands around her brushes, and her eyes burned, but still she layered color onto the canvas.

  It was a kind of madness, she thought, the way it felt to finish a painting. The muscle-memory knowledge of exactly where the brushstrokes went, even though this was nothing she had painted before. The fizzing feeling at the top of her head that told her what she was painting was right, was true. The adrenaline that flooded her until she couldn’t sit, or sleep, or eat, until it was finished.

  Madness, surely. But a madness of wings, and of glory.

  • • •

  The skies of New York had grown stranger. Sweeney was used to the occasional airborne mystery. It wasn’t as if he had ever thought himself the only sometimes bird on the wing.

  But a flock of firebirds had taken up residence in Central Park, and an exaltation of larks had begun exalting in Mandarin in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  He thought he had seen the phoenix, but perhaps it had only been a particularly gaudy sunset.

  Magic all unasked for, and stuck about with feathers.

  Though perhaps not magic unconjured.

  Sweeney paged through a notebook, not lost on a train but slid from a messenger bag. He had wanted, he supposed, to see how she saw him.

  Of course, he was in none of the sketches.

  But its pages crawled with magic. It was rife in the shadows and shadings and lines of the sketches. Sweeney didn’t know if it was wizardry or not, what he was looking at, but there was power in her drawings.

  Perhaps enough power to unmake a curse.

  • • •

  “You’re sure I can’t convince you to come to the opening?” Brian asked. “Because I think people are really going to want to talk to you about these paintings, and Maeve, do not say, ‘My art speaks for itself.’ ”

  “You have to admit, you pretty much asked me to.”

  “Maeve.”

  “They’ll sell better if I’m not there.”

  “What would make you think that?”

  Because if I’m there, I’ll spend the entire evening locked in the bathroom, occasionally vomiting from panic, she thought. “Because if I’m not there, you can spin me as mysterious. Or better yet, perfect. Tell them what they want to hear without the risk that I’ll show up with paint still in my hair.”

  “I have never once seen you with paint in your hair. And even if I had, artists are supposed to be absentminded and eccentric. It’s part of your charm.”

  “You told me I wasn’t allowed to be absentminded and eccentric anymore, remember? Not in this gallery. Not at these prices.”

  “I suppose I did. Still, this is your night, Maeve. If you want to be here, even if there is paint in your hair, you should come.”

  “I can assure you, Brian, I won’t want to.”

  • • •

  Sweeney could, if he concentrated enough, prevent the shift in form from man to bird from happening. Usually, he didn’t bother—the change came when it would, and after all these years, he had made peace with his spontaneous wings.

  But he wanted to see the paintings. To see, captured in pigment and brushstroke, the birds that Maeve had made a space for in New York’s skies.

  He wanted to see her, just once, in the guise and costume of a normal man.

  More, he wanted to see if the magic that crackled across the pages of her notebook was in the paintings as well, to see if she could paint him free. A request that might allow him to once again be a normal man, instead of what he was: a creature cursed into loneliness and the wrong skin, whose only consolation was the further loneliness of flight.

  Sweeney’s difficulty was that while he could, by force of will, hold himself in human form, it let the madness push further into his consciousness. The longer he fought the transformation, the more he struggled to be shaped like a man, the less he thought like one.

  Sweeney slid on his jacket. He checked to make sure his buttons matched, his fly was up, and his shoes were from the same pair. He hailed a cab and hoped for the best.

  • • •

  On the night of the opening, Maeve was not at the gallery. She had been there earlier in the day to double-check the way the paintings had been hung, to see to all the last-minute details, and to tell Brian, one more time, that she was absolutely not coming to the opening.

  “Fine. Then at least put on a nice dress at home and have some champagne with a friend so I don’t get depressed thinking about you.”

  “If that’s what will make you happy, of course I will,” she lied, offering a big smile and accepting Brian’s hug.

  As the show opened, Maeve was wearing a T-shirt with holes in it and eating soup dumplings. Which she toasted with a glass of the very fine champagne that Brian had sent over. Emilia texted from the gallery that the “paintings are your best thing ever. So proud of you!” Comfort and celebration and a friend, even if far from what Brian imagined.

  Strange to think that this show, which Brian thought could be big enough to change her career, had begun with seeing a bird turn into a naked man. Which was certainly the one story she could never tell when asked what inspired her work.

  She hadn’t seen the bird for a while now. Or, thankfully, the naked man. Some parts of the strangeness of the city were better left unexplained.

  Too many answers killed the magic, and Maeve wanted the magic. Its possibilities were what made up for the discomfort and worry of everyday life.

  • • •

  The lights were too bright and there were too many people. Sweeney bit the insides of his cheeks and walked through the gallery as if its floor were shattering glass.

  The paintings. He thought they were beautiful, probably, or that they would be if he could ever stand still long enough to really look at them, to see them as more than blurs as he circled the gallery. He felt too hot, his skin ill-fitting, his heart racing like a bird’s.

  Sweeney clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms, and forced his breath in and out until it steadied.

  There.

  Almost comfortably human.

  Sweeney walked the room slowly this time, giving himself space to step back and look at the canvases.

  Feathers itched and crawled beneath his skin.

  And there he was.

  The still point at the center of the painting, and feathers were bursting from his skin there, too, but there, it didn’t look like madness, it looked like transcendence.

  Sweeney heaved in a breath.

  “It does have that effect on people.”

  Sweeney glanced at the man standing next to him, the man who hadn’t seemed to realize it was Sweeney in the painting hanging before them.

  “Are you familiar with Maeve’s work? Maeve Collins, the artist, I mean,” Brian said.

  “Ah. A bit. Only recently. Is she here tonight?”

  “Not yet, though I hope she’ll make an appearance later. But if you’re interested in the piece, I’d be happy to assist you with it.”

  “If I buy it, can I meet her?”

  “I can understand why you’d make the request, but that’s not the usual way art sales work.”

  And now the man standing next to him did step back and look at Sweeney. “Wait. Wait. You’re the model for the painting. Oh, this is fantastic.”

 
Feathers. Feathers unfurling in his blood.

  “But of course you’d know Maeve already, then.”

  “I don’t.” Sweeney braceleted his wrist, his left wrist, downed with white feathers, with his right hand. “But I think I need to.”

  He unwrapped his fingers and extended his feathered hand to the man in the gallery, beneath the painting that was and wasn’t him.

  Brian looked down at the feathers. “I’ll call her.”

  • • •

  “I don’t care how good the party is, Brian, I’m not coming.”

  “Your model is here, and he would like to meet you.”

  “How many vodka tonics have you had? That doesn’t even make sense. I didn’t use any models in this series.”

  “Not even the guy with feathers coming out of his skin? Because he’s standing right in front of the painting, and it certainly looks like him, not to mention this thing where I’m watching him grow feathers on his arms, and what the fuck is going on here, Maeve?”

  “What did you say?” The flesh on her arms rose up in goose bumps.

  “You heard me. You need to get here.

  “Now.”

  • • •

  Maeve took a cab and went in through the service entrance, where she had loaded the paintings earlier that week.

  “Brian, what is—you!”

  “Yes,” Sweeney said, and in an explosion of feathers and collapsing clothes, he turned into a bird.

  • • •

  Maeve sat with the bird while the celebration trickled out of the gallery. She had gathered up the clothes he had been wearing, and folded them into precise piles, stuffing his socks into the toes of the shoes, spinning the belt into a coil.

  At one point, Brian had brought back a mostly empty bottle of vodka, filched from the bar. Maeve took a swig, and thought of taking another before deciding that some degree of sobriety was in order to counterbalance the oddity of the night.

  The bird didn’t seem interested in drinking either.

  Maeve dropped her head into her hands and scraped her hair back into a knot. When she sat up again, Sweeney was pulling on his pants.

  “I am sorry about before. Stress makes me less capable of interacting with people.”

  Maeve laughed under her breath. “I can relate.”

  Brian walked back. “Oh, good. You’re, uh, dressed again. Have you two figured out what’s going on?”

  “I am under a curse,” Sweeney said. “And I think Maeve can paint me free of it. There is some kind of power in her work, something that I would call magic. I’d like to commission a painting from her to see if this is possible.”

  “That’s . . .” Maeve bit down hard on the next word.

  “Mad? Impossible?” Sweeney met her eyes. “So am I.”

  “I’m not magic,” Maeve said.

  “That may be. After all this time and change, I am not a bird, though I sometimes have the shape of one. Magic reshapes truth.”

  Maeve could see the bird in the lines of the man, in the way he held his weight, in the shape of the almost-wings the air made space for.

  She could see the impossibility, too, of what was asked.

  “Please,” said Sweeney. “Try.”

  “I’ll need you,” Maeve said, “to pose for me.”

  • • •

  “This has got to be the weirdest contract I have ever negotiated.”

  “Brian. You negotiated with a guy who had been a bird for a significant part of the evening. Even if it had been straight-up ‘sign here’ boilerplate, it still would have been the weirdest contract you ever negotiated.”

  “True.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a deadline.” Maeve picked up one of the white feathers from the floor, ran it through her fingers. “Some way of marking whether this will work or not, rather than just waiting to find out.”

  “You say ‘whether’ like you genuinely believe it’s a possibility, Maeve.

  “And yes, this has been a night of strangeness, but magic is not what happens at the end. The way this ends is that you’re going to wind up painting a very nice picture for a guy who is, I don’t know how, sometimes a bird, and he is still going to be sometimes a bird after it is signed and framed, and once it is, we will never speak of this again because it is just too weird.

  “You’re good, Maeve. But you’re not a magician. So stop worrying about whether there’s magic in your painting, because there isn’t.”

  “You said people don’t buy paintings just because of what’s on the canvas, they buy the story they think the painting tells,” Maeve said.

  Brian nodded.

  “Sweeney bought a story where magic might be what happens at the end. He’s bought that hope.

  “And that much, I can paint.”

  • • •

  Maeve took a sketchbook and went back to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. It seemed like the right place to start, even if she didn’t put the church itself into her painting. Full circle, somehow, to try to end the transformation in the same place she had first witnessed it.

  Spring had come early, the buds on the trees beginning to limn the branches with a haze of green. The crocuses unfurled their purples in among the feet of the trees, and an occasional bold daffodil waved yellow.

  And this was transformation too, Maeve thought. More regular, less astonishing than a man suddenly enfeathered, but change all the same.

  Maeve sat beneath a branch of birdsong and cleared her mind of the magic she had been asked to make. If the bird—if Sweeney—was correct, it would be there anyway.

  She opened her sketchbook and began to draw.

  • • •

  Sweeney walked the streets of his city. It wasn’t often that he wandered on foot, preferring to save his peregrinations for when he wore wings. But tonight, he did not want to be above the grease and char scents of food cooking on sidewalk carts, of the crunch of shattered glass beneath his shoes.

  He wanted the pulse and the press of people he had never quite felt home among. They would be his home if Maeve succeeded. Perhaps then he would feel as if he belonged.

  He should have, perhaps, spent his night on the wing, the flight a fragment to shore against the ruin of his days once he could no longer fly. He would miss, every day of his life he would miss, the sensation of the air as his feathers cut through it. But he would have a life.

  Sweeney bought truly execrable coffee in an I LOVE NY cup, because at that moment, with every fiber of his being, Sweeney did.

  • • •

  “Can I ask . . .” Maeve hesitated.

  “How this happened,” Sweeney said.

  She looked up from her sketchbook. “Well, yes. I don’t want to be rude, or ask you to talk about something that’s hurtful, but maybe I’ll know better how to paint you out of being a bird if I know how you became one in the first place.”

  “It was a curse.”

  “I thought that was the kind of thing that only happened in fairy tales.”

  Sweeney shrugged, then apologized.

  “That’s fine. I don’t need you to hold the pose.

  “And I’ll stop interrupting.” Maeve bent back to her sketchbook.

  “It is like something from a fairy tale. I was angry. I spoke and acted without thought, and, in the way of these things, it was a wizard I insulted. He cursed me for what I had done.

  “For over a thousand years since, this has been my life.”

  “I’m sorry. Even if it was your fault, over a thousand years of vengeance seems cruel.”

  Tension rippled over Sweeney’s skin. He shrank in on himself, fingers curling to claws.

  “What is it?”

  Sweeney extended his arm. Feathers downed its underside. “I had hoped this wouldn’t happen.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Only in my pride. Which was the point of the thing, after all.” He schooled his breathing, and Maeve watched him relax, muscle by muscle. Except for a patch near
his wrist, the feathers fell from Sweeney’s skin.

  “May I?” Maeve asked.

  Sweeney nodded.

  Maeve stroked her hand over his wrist, feeling the feathers’ softness, and the heat of Sweeney’s skin beneath. Heart racing like a bird’s, she stepped closer and kissed him.

  A beat passed, and then another.

  Sweeney’s hand fisted in her hair, and he shuddered a breath into her mouth. She struggled out of her clothes, not wanting to break the kiss, or the contact.

  Feathers alternated with skin under Maeve’s hands, and Sweeney traced the outlines of her shoulder blades as if she, too, had wings.

  As they moved together, Sweeney was neither feathered nor mad. Maeve did not feel the panic of a body too close, only the joy of a body exactly close enough.

  White feathers blanketed the floor beneath them.

  • • •

  Maeve looked at Sweeney. “I don’t think the painting is going to work.”

  “Why?” He tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “I mean, I think it will be a good painting. But I don’t think it will be magic.”

  “I’m no worse than I am now if it isn’t. All I ask for is a good painting, Maeve. Anything beyond that would be”—he smiled—“magic.”

  • • •

  The parcel arrived in Wednesday’s post. Inside, the sketchbook Maeve had lost. In the front cover, a scrawled note: “Forgive me my temporary theft. It’s long past time that I returned this. —S.” There was also a white feather.

  She flipped through the pages and wondered what Sweeney had seen that convinced him her art was magic, the kind of magic that could help him. Whatever that thing had been, she couldn’t see it.

  Maeve kept the feather, but she slid the notebook into a fresh envelope to return it to Sweeney. Even if she couldn’t give him freedom, she could give him this.

  That done, Maeve took down all the reference photos of mystical, fantastic birds that she had printed out and hung on her walls while painting the show for the gallery. She closed the covers of the bestiaries and slid feathers into glassine envelopes, making bright kaleidoscopes of fallen flight.