A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

Here are the rules for the game my husband plays. It begins at the heart of winter, the ending of the year, at the great feasts of those brightly lit holidays, meant to call back the sun from the darkness. Someone calls for a wonder, and he goes.

  My husband is a wonder, you see. He is vine and leaf, oak and holly, tree and forest and winter, wrapped around the shape of a man. The heart of him is a green and secret thing.

  And, well, there is the small matter of his head.

  He will pound on the doors until they open before his blows, and stand before the one who called. In the early days of the story, the summoner would be a king, overfed and drunk, in his Christmas court. Now it is just as likely a CEO and corporate party—more drink, less food. Sometimes even the staged reality of a television show, and a room full of cameras and calculated angles. Once he has arrived before his audience, my husband will brandish his axe and ask: “Who is so bold in his blood and his brain that will dare strike one stroke for another?”

  Oh, it sounds archaic now, and every so often, someone asks him to change the wording—“Why can’t you just say, ‘You try to cut off my head and then I try to cut off yours’?”—but there is a formula to these things. The words matter. Besides, regardless of the phrasing, there is always someone willing to take the second part in this game, and brains have very little to do with it. They all think that they are special, they are chosen, they are as much a wonder as my husband is.

  Then my husband will hand the axe over to the volunteer—a knight in armor, a lawyer in a suit, an actor in this month’s designer T-shirt—and will make a big fuss about kneeling down, bending his head, baring his neck to the blow.

  The poor, silly boy who has no real idea what he’s gotten himself into, how old and how unpitying this story is, who thinks he is clever enough to get himself out of it, will pick up the axe, and smile, rooster-chested, at the queen, at the boss’s wife, at the starlet of the week, and strike. The axe will bite true, and my husband’s head will fall to the floor.

  The boy—he will not think of himself as a boy, he will think of himself as a knight, as a man—will pose with the axe, will bow. Someone among those gathered will apologize to the queen for the mess, the blood.

  And then my husband’s body will stand up from the floor, and my husband’s hand will reach into his hair, and he will pick up his fallen head, and his head will speak: “You must come to endure what you have dealt.”

  Someone usually faints at this point. It’s never the person with the camera.

  The rules are given, the chapel green, a year and a day, otherwise all honor lost. Honor. As if that was ever what this was about.

  Head tucked under his arm, my husband turns, and comes home to me.

  • • •

  They show up early, the boys. Days, even weeks before the deadline, even now, in these days of planes and cars and GPS. So concerned with honor and reputation, with not looking like a coward, a pussy, they must pretend they are eager for the axe’s kiss, for a blow they must understand will be fatal if struck. But they think they are special. They think there is a way out, at least for them. They are almost right.

  This is when the second part of the game begins.

  My husband disguises himself as someone whose beard is not made of oak leaves, whose arms are not wrapped around with trailing vines of ivy, and whose head, if struck off, would remain decorously detached and would definitely not start speaking.

  He invites them to stay with us—we’re close by, after all—and isn’t it better to go to such an ordeal well-rested and fed? He pours them a drink, ice rattling against crystal, and smiles.

  The boys look at the warm amber color of the scotch. They think of the thread count of the sheets in this house, versus those of the cheap hotel just down the road. The boys look at me. They say yes.

  My husband smiles.

  • • •

  He makes a deal with them—it’s the deal he always makes. “Anything you’re given while you’re here, you give to me.” He knows they’ll say yes, these boys. They are here precisely because they’re the kind of people who take dares, who say yes, who gamble. They are here to take a blow from an axe.

  They think they can cheat and never be found out.

  I am to be the thing that tests their honor: to offer sweet words, to offer kisses, to offer a casual fuck. The reality TV people, they love this. It’s their favorite part, the thing that really kicks the ratings up. It’s so drama, it’s edgy, it’s just potentially queer enough to titillate once the camera cuts away.

  The cameras always cut away. At least when the kisses are traded back to my husband.

  When this game began, I would play along. I would tempt the boys and laugh to see which of my offers they would accept. I would kiss them and smile, knowing my husband would taste me on their mouths. If he was going to give me away, I would take what pleasure I could get out of it.

  If they tell him what they’ve been given, if they return to him those kisses and more, my husband tells them he understands, that what happened was my fault, no man could resist what it is I offer. When they kneel and bare their necks to him, he swings the axe and holds, the thin and almost bloodless line on their skin just deep enough to scar—a reminder, nothing more.

  I cannot remember the last time this was how the game ended.

  If the boys keep their secrets and mine, my husband cuts off their heads, and then he looks at me and smiles. This is, after all, my fault.

  The first time this happened, so long and long ago, I felt the blow. A thud that landed in my chest, as if my husband’s axe had hit me in the heart.

  When it happens now, the cameras cut away.

  It’s so easy, if you’re watching, to tell yourself it’s special effects. The blood is added in post. That it could never happen. Not really.

  It’s so easy to ignore all the hard parts of a story when you don’t have to live it.

  The boys’ heads don’t reattach.

  No matter how you bleach it, bone is never as white as snow.

  • • •

  And then one year, the boy doesn’t show up. It is two days after the New Year and snow is falling outside, and the cameras are waiting, and my husband, green and wild, is pacing back and forth, axe in hand. Phone calls are made, texts sent, emails written, and no one can find him, this boy that is now late to his appointment with an axe. They can’t believe it; I can’t believe it has taken this long for someone to realize there is no game if you simply refuse to play.

  But there is such panic. There won’t be an episode, there will be no story without some silly knight and his honor, kneeling at my husband’s feet. Everyone is desperate for the end.

  “I’ll do it.”

  The cameras turn to me. My husband laughs.

  “All I need do is trade blows, yes? I return to you everything that I’ve been given while I’ve been here?” The cameras love this idea. My husband shrugs. It’s not precisely the game he wants, but it’s better than nothing.

  So we crunch through the snow to the chapel green, to the heart of the forest. The berries are red on the holly and the air smells of pine.

  I do not look at the skulls that line the eaves of the chapel.

  My husband says the words of the challenge and hands me his axe. He kneels at my feet, stretching his head toward the altar. There is blood, old, rust-colored, sunk into the stones.

  I swing the axe, and it cuts through his neck as if it is nothing. His head falls to the ground. But I am not finished. I swing the axe a second time, cutting through his chest, through the twisted vines that grow where his heart would be.

  “Everything,” I say, “that I have been given, I give back to you.”

  My husband’s eyes close. His body does not stand. His head does not speak. I drop the axe next to his corpse.

  I walk from the chapel. Blood falls from my hands, red as holly berries on the white snow.

  Breaking the Frame

  Escape

  The
photograph is of a woman at the center of a forest. She is as slim and tall and pale as the birches she stands among. The shadows turn her ribs and spine into branches, into knots in the wood. Around her arms, the peeling white bark of the birches, curved in bracelets. Between her thighs, the hair is dense and springy like moss.

  She is turning into a tree.

  All the stories tell us that this sort of transformation is the kind of thing that used to happen all the time, when maidens fled—good, virtuous girls—before the rampant desires of the gods. When they could run no more, they stopped, put down roots, raised up branches, and made themselves inviolate. Very nearly always a god will prefer warm, wet flesh to splinters.

  To escape a god, a woman must lose her self.

  The wood closes around her.

  It was the first photograph he took of her.

  “I need a model,” he said. “For an ongoing series of work. Photographs.”

  Francesca sighed and sipped her coffee. “And I’m sure it’s very legit, really, and any nudity will only be tasteful and artistic, and—what are you doing?”

  He had set a laptop on the table next to her and was opening files. “Here’s my portfolio. My agent’s card, and the information of the last gallery where I showed. Call them. Google me. Talk to anyone. Then call me.”

  The photos on the screen were good. If he was a creep, at least he was a talented one.

  “And who do I ask for, if I decide I’m saying yes?” Her voice was warm at the end of the question, an answer already implied in the asking.

  “You mean when?” He smiled, and he was gorgeous. “Vaughan. Vaughan Matthews.”

  She said yes. Of course she said yes. There are no stories when people say no.

  • • •

  Six Seeds from a Pomegranate

  At the center of the photograph is a pomegranate, torn open. Seeds are scattered everywhere. At the right edge of the image is a young woman, hair tangled and eyes soft, as if she has just woken from a lover’s bed. Her hands are stained red.

  Between her lips is a pomegranate seed.

  That was the first time they slept together. Francesca’s hands were still sticky from the pomegranate’s juice, and she left red smears across the white cotton of Vaughan’s sheets. When they kissed, their mouths tasted of the wine-dark fruit, simultaneously sweet and tart, of desire so great that a person might consign herself to the underworld in order to satiate it.

  After, she sat up, the red-smeared sheets pooled around her waist. “You realize the only way this would be more of a fucking cliché would be if I asked you for a cigarette right now.”

  “What’s wrong with being a cliché?” Vaughan asked. “There’s truth in them. They wouldn’t last so long otherwise.”

  He tugged the sheet from her fingers, then laced his hand with hers. Tenderness, not lust.

  This, Francesca thought. This was going to be trouble.

  • • •

  Delilah

  The woman is shot from behind, thick, tangled hair streaming down her back. She is barefoot, in a thin white dress. Held lightly in her left hand is a pair of scissors, blades open.

  Transformation is a magic that becomes more natural with repetition. It is difficult at first, to slide behind someone’s eyes, to pull their skin up and over yours. The seams show. The fit isn’t quite.

  The next time is easier, and then the next, until becoming a new person takes no more work than buttoning on a new shirt.

  The thing about changing into someone else, inhabiting their life, even if only briefly, is that each time it takes a heartbeat longer to remember who you were. One more breath before your soul returns to yourself. You are never quite the person you were before.

  Perhaps not pearl-eyed, but sea-changed. Something strange.

  “I want to try the shot with you completely submerged.”

  “Vaughan. The water is cold. Not lukewarm. Not tepid. But freezing-my-tits-off cold.”

  “It’s making the blue tone in your skin fantastic. I’ll get some close-ups, too.”

  Francesca stared at him, then climbed back into the lake. The layers of skirts she was wearing clung to her legs, weighing her down, and the flowers that had been strewn across the surface of the water were bedraggled and worse for wear.

  She supposed she was, too.

  In and out of the water she climbed, Ophelia rescuing herself, only to drown again at her lover’s request.

  Vaughan showed her the digital shots as he worked, and he was right—of course he was—about what the cold water was doing to the color of her skin: bluing her lips and shadowing her eyes in ways that makeup never could.

  Francesca looked haunted, broken, dead.

  The photographs were gorgeous.

  “One more, as the sun sets.”

  So numb she couldn’t shiver anymore, Francesca slid back into the water. And she slid beneath the surface, and she slid into darkness.

  • • •

  Pray You Love, Remember

  Taken as the sun sets, the living fire on the surface of the lake is a stark contrast to the drowned woman floating beneath it.

  This photograph was exhibited only once, and Matthews has said he will never sell it. Speculation in the art world suggests this decision is due to the circumstances under which the shot was taken. The model, Francesca Ward, nearly died, and then fell ill from pneumonia.

  Matthews did no new work during her illness.

  Francesca fell in love with Vaughan when he brought a book of fairy tales to read to her while she was sick.

  That’s not quite true.

  But she felt an ache inside her chest as Vaughan’s voice broke over Beauty leaving her family and running back to the side of the ailing Beast, and the ache turned to warm honey as his hand fell from the page to hold hers.

  It was safe then, his hand on hers, to say the word “love.”

  But really, the falling had been a foregone conclusion from the moment he showed her his photos and asked her to be in them.

  Vaughan captured pieces of the world—never as it was, but as it could have been, as it almost was. As it might actually be, if we just looked around the edges and noticed the magic.

  That was how he saw her, too, Francesca thought. As if she might be magic around the edges.

  When someone sees you like that, falling in love is always only a question of when.

  • • •

  Beauty and—

  In the foreground of the photograph is a rose on top of a cracked mirror. There are clocks everywhere, fallen, tilted, askew, and all with their hands fixed at three minutes to twelve. Given the shadows in the picture, one assumes the hour being chased is midnight.

  At the left is a woman in a ruined ball gown. She holds the head of a beast.

  There is a thing that happens to stories when you try to change them. Narrative is resistant to change. It clings to its themes, its arcs, its tropes.

  If you find the fault lines along the story’s center and apply pressure, you can expose the pulse of its bloody heart. You can draw your pen through its entrails and read the signs within.

  But once you have, once you have gazed upon the heart of a story, your changes will be woven into its fabric, embraced as a variant text. The story will reshape itself around what you have written, will scar over the wounds that you have so carefully made.

  You can change it, but the thing you loved in the story will always look different to you after.

  • • •

  Look Back in—

  The woman is shot from the back, and there is a bright light before her, so we see her only in outline. She is climbing up a set of steps hewn into rock, climbing out of somewhere.

  Or perhaps not.

  A hand reaches through the light toward her. Instead of reaching for it, she looks over her shoulder, turning back.

  “That wasn’t the photograph I took. You saw the finished shot. You know.”

  “I was there, Vaughan. I know that’
s not the shot. I didn’t turn my head, never looked back.”

  Why would she have? She knew the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was Orpheus who looked back, and Eurydice who disappeared, returned to death. She trusted him enough to follow him out of the darkness, but he had no faith in her silent footsteps.

  “I didn’t look back,” she repeated.

  “I know,” said Vaughan.

  “But I thought about it.”

  “What?”

  “I thought about what it would be like, walking out of death, and back into life, and how my feet would ache from walking, and how the sun would hurt my eyes, and what if I didn’t want to go with him?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, we assume Eurydice loved Orpheus because of the story, and how he goes down to Hades for her and everything, but no one ever asked her if she loved him. No one asked her if she wanted to go back.”

  “So you did.”

  Francesca laughed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry if I fucked up your picture.”

  “I’m not. And you didn’t. It isn’t what I thought I was getting, but it’s good.”

  The problem with wonders is their duplication. When something happens once, it is a miracle. When the miracle recurs, it must be renamed.

  Language is not meant to contain miracles. To manifest, they require somewhat else.

  • • •

  Subtext

  The photograph is a nude. The model’s body is entirely covered by lines of text. The quotations are taken from fairy tale and myth, romance and fantasy, and they turn the model’s body into a palimpsest from a commonplace book.

  However, if the text on the body is read carefully, it becomes clear that certain of the stories have been altered from their known forms.

  Which ones have been so rewritten is a matter for debate.

  Shadows of words remained on Francesca’s skin, ghost-tattoos of stories that almost were.

  She had asked Vaughan not to tell her the lines he’d chosen, not to say which stories he was inscribing on her skin. She had kept her eyes closed, had not read what was written on her body.

  And still.

  “Some of them changed,” he said. “Like this one: ‘“Find me,” she said, and stepped out of her shoes of glass.’ ”