by Kat Howard
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CONTENTS
Introduction
A Life in Fictions
The Saint of the Sidewalks
Maiden, Hunter, Beast
Once, Future
Translatio Corporis
Dreaming Like a Ghost
Murdered Sleep
The Speaking Bone
Those Are Pearls
All of Our Past Places
Saints’ Tide
Painted Birds and Shivered Bones
Returned
The Calendar of Saints
The Green Knight’s Wife
Breaking the Frame
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Becky, who asked for a story
INTRODUCTION
Writing, for me, is an act of faith. When I sit down to write, I have to believe in what I am writing. Any hesitation, any loss of faith, and the story breaks down, falls apart. I have words scribbled on pages—maybe even beautiful words—but without belief, they’re not a story. And the faith doesn’t end there. I have to believe that the story will find an audience. That somewhere out in the world, there is a reader who will also believe in that story, and in that act of belief is where the miracle occurs: the story becomes real.
I grew up steeped in story. Not just fairy tales and myths, but hagiography as well. The richness and strangeness of these stories, their glorious impossibility, their connection to the numinous, made them the first stories I’d found that I wanted to believe in. At recess I was as likely to pretend to be Joan of Arc fighting the English as I was Artemis shooting her bow. But as I grew older and started writing, I realized that for all their power, the old stories—the myths and the fairy tales and the lives of the saints—told a very narrow sort of story, one that closed off more doors than it opened. Here was one way to be, they said. Here was the set of rules that led to the happy ending; be careful lest you break them. It was a narrow view of stories that held such potential. When I wrote my versions of these stories, I wanted to look at them with new eyes, break them out of the frames they had been displayed in, tell their truth slant.
And this, too, is an act of faith: the belief that there is life and truth in the old stories, that I can find that truth and make it recognizable even as I turn it inside out. If I didn’t believe in these stories, if the way they were told didn’t matter to me, there would be no reason for me to spend time in them—to listen for the silenced voices, to look for the gaps in the narratives. To believe that there are important stories in the silence and the gaps, even if those weren’t the stories that were originally told.
I am drawn to short fiction because it distills the beauty and the darkness that are possible in fiction, and particularly in the fantastic. It allows stories to be more intense, more dreamlike, for me as a writer to hang a skin of myth on the skeleton of the strange. This collection, which includes previously published work as well as original material, showcases my quest to re-envision those old stories that first made me love fiction and the fantastic. To give an ancient Irish king new life in New York City, to see the burden of sainthood when prayers can be sent by email, to tell and retell the story of King Arthur on a modern college campus. To show that the power in the old stories can be extended, carried on, made fresh, and opened up for a new audience.
And of course not every story here is a retelling of something older. Some of these stories engage more directly with questions of faith: of how belief—or its lack—can be the thing that pushes you outside of the story that you are comfortable in, and into a story that’s altogether stranger.
Turn the page. I have miracles to offer you.
A Life in Fictions
He wrote me into a story again.
I told him to stop doing that, after we broke up. In fact, it was one of the reasons that we broke up. I mean, being a muse is all well and good, until you actually become one.
The first time it happened, I was flattered. And it wasn’t like my normal life was so great that I was going to miss it, you know? So getting pulled into that world—a world he had written just for me, where I was the everything, the unattainable, the ideal—it was pretty powerful.
When he finished the story, and I came back to the real world, the first thing I did was screw him until my thighs ached. It was our first time together. He said it was the best sex of his life.
When I asked him if someone had ever fallen into a story that he had written before, he said not that he knew of. Oh, sure, he had based characters on people he knew, stolen little bits of their lives. A gesture, a phrase, a particular color of eye or way of walking. The petty thievery all writers commit.
I asked what he had done differently this time.
“I was falling in love with you, I guess. You were all I could think of. So when I wrote Marah, there you were in my head. Always.”
I hadn’t fallen into the story right away, and I didn’t know what happened in the parts where Marah didn’t appear. Reading the finished draft was this weird mix of déjà vu and mystery.
Apparently inspired by my real-world sexual abandon, the next thing he wrote me into was an erotic novella. Ali was a great deal more flexible than I was, both physically and in her gender preferences.
I really enjoyed that story, but one night I tried something in bed that Ali thought was fun but that he thought was beyond kinky. After that, the only sex scenes he wrote me into involved oral sex.
Men can be so predictable, even when they are literary geniuses.
Maybe especially then.
The next time he wrote me into something, I lost my job. It was a novel, what he was working on then, and when he was writing Nora, I would just disappear from my life as soon as he picked up his pen. For days, or even weeks, at a time, when the writing was going well.
He said he didn’t know what happened to me during those times. He would go to my apartment, check on things, water my plants. When he remembered. When he wasn’t so deep in the writing that nothing outside registered.
I was always in his head during those times, he said, at the edges of his thoughts. As if that should reassure me.
It happened faster. He would begin to write, and I would be in the story, and I would stay there until he was finished.
The more I lived in his writing, the less I lived in the real world, and the less I remembered what it was like to live in the real world, as a real person, as me.
When the writing was going well, I would be surrounded by the comfortable, warm feeling that someone else knew what was going on, was making all the decisions, was the safety net under the high wire. Everything was gauzy, soft
focus, fuzzed at the periphery.
I could have an adventure without worrying about the consequences. After all, I was always at the edges of his thoughts.
Until the day I wasn’t. Everything froze, and I was in a cold white room, full of statues of the people I had been talking to.
I walked from person to person, attempting to start conversations, but nothing happened. Walked around the room again, looking for a way out, but there was nothing. Solid white walls, floor, ceiling. It was a large room, but I could feel the pressure of the walls against my skin.
I walked to the center of the room and sat, cross-legged, on the floor. Waiting.
Have you ever had your mind go blank? That space between one thought and the next when your brain is just white noise, when there is not one thought in your head—do you remember that feeling?
Imagine that absence extending forever. There’s no way of escaping it, because you don’t know—not don’t remember, don’t know—what you were thinking about before your brain blanked out, and so you don’t know what to do to get it started again. There’s just nothing. Silence. White.
And there’s no time. No way of telling how long you sit in that vast, claustrophobic white room, becoming increasingly less.
I never was able to figure out how long I waited there. But suddenly I was in a room I had never seen before, back in the real world, and he was there.
There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and grey threading through his hair. Writer’s block, he explained to me. He had tried to write through it, work on other projects, but nothing helped. Finally, that morning, he had abandoned the novel as unworkable.
I asked if he had tried to bring me back, while he was stuck.
He hadn’t really thought of it.
That was when I broke up with him.
He had, I discovered, become quite successful while I was away. A critical darling, praised especially for the complexity, the reality, of his female characters.
Speaking of Marah in an interview, he described her as his one lost love. The interviewer found it romantic.
I found the interviewer tiresome. Being lost was not romantic at all.
Parts of me stayed lost, or got covered over by all those other women I had been for him. Sure, they were me, but they were his view of me, exaggerated, slightly shifted, truth told slant.
I would turn up a song on the radio, then remember that it was Ali who liked punk. I abandoned my favorite bakery for two weeks when I convinced myself that I had Fiona’s gluten allergy.
For three months, I thought my name was Marah.
During all of this, there were intervals of normalcy. But I still felt the tugs as he borrowed little pieces of me for his fictions. I would lose my favorite perfume, or the memory of the first time I had my heart broken. Tiny bits of myself that would slough away, painlessly. Sometimes they would return when he wrote, “The End.” More often, they did not.
I reminded him that he had promised not to write about me anymore. He assured me he hadn’t meant to. It was just bits, here and there. He’d be more careful. And really, I ought to be flattered.
But then a week of my life disappeared. I loved that short story, and Imogen was an amazing character, the kind of woman that I wished I was. That wasn’t the point.
The point was he had stolen me from myself again. I was just gone, and I didn’t know where I went. And there were more things about myself that I had forgotten. Was green really my favorite color?
I flicked on the computer, started typing madly. Everything I could remember about myself. But when I looked over the file, there were gaps that I knew I had once remembered, and duplications of events.
Panting, I stripped off my clothing and stared at myself, hoping that my body was more real than my mind. But was that scar on my knee from falling off my bike when I was twelve, or from a too-sharp rock at the beach when I was seventeen? Was that really how I waved hello? Would I cry at a time like this?
Anyone would, I supposed.
I tried to rewrite myself. I scoured boxes of faded flower petals and crumpled ticket stubs, paged obsessively through old yearbooks. Called friend after friend to play “Do you remember . . . ?”
When I remembered enough to ask. To know who my friends were.
It didn’t work. Whatever gift he had or curse that I was under that let him pull me into his stories, it was a magic too arcane for me to duplicate.
And still, the gaps in my life increased. New changes happened. I woke one morning to find my hair was white. Not like an old woman’s, but the platinum white of a rock star or some elven queen.
I didn’t dye it back.
There was a collection published of his short fiction. He appeared on “Best of” lists and was short-listed for important literary prizes.
I forgot if I took milk in my coffee.
He called, asked to see me. Told me he still loved me, was haunted by memories of my skin, my voice, my scent. I missed, I thought, those things too. So I told him yes.
It took him a moment to recognize me, he said, when I walked across the bar to meet him. Something was different. I told him I didn’t know what that might be.
He ordered for both of us. I let him. I was sure he knew what I liked.
There was a story, he explained. He thought maybe the best thing he would ever write. He could feel the electricity of it crackle across his skin, feel the words that he would write pound and echo in his brain.
He had an outline that I could look at, see what I thought. He slid a slim folder across the table.
I wondered aloud why, this time, he would ask permission. This one was longer. An epic. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to write it. And after what had happened the last time, when I had . . . Well. He wanted to ask.
I appreciated the gesture.
I drummed my fingers across the top of the folder but did not open it.
A waiter discreetly set a martini to the right of my plate. Funny. I had thought that it was Madeleine who drank martinis. But I sipped, and closed my eyes in pleasure at the sharpness of the alcohol.
I said yes.
To one more story, this masterpiece that I could see burning in his eyes. But I had a condition.
Anything, he said. Whatever I needed.
I wanted him to leave me in the story when he was finished.
He told me he had wondered if I might ask for that. I was surprised he hadn’t known. He nodded agreement, and that was settled.
We talked idly through dinner. Occasionally his eyes would unfocus, and I could see the lines of plot being woven together behind them.
I wondered what he would name me this time, almost asked, then realized it didn’t matter. Then realized I wasn’t even sure what my own name was anymore. Grace, maybe? I thought that sounded right. Grace.
He started scribbling on the cover of the folder while we were waiting for the check. I watched him write.
“Rafe fell in love with her voice first, tumbled into it when she introduced herself as . . .”
The Saint of the Sidewalks
Joan wrote her prayer with a half-used tube of Chanel Vamp that she had found discarded at the Thirty-Fourth Street subway stop. It glided across the cardboard—the flip side of a Stoli box, torn and bent—and left her words in a glossy slick the color of dried blood: “I need a miracle.”
You were supposed to be specific when asking the Saint of the Sidewalks for an intervention, but everything in her life was such a fucking disaster, Joan didn’t know where to start. So, she asked for a miracle, nonspecific variety.
She set her cardboard on the sidewalk, prayer-side up. Then lit the required cigarette—stolen out of the pack of some guy who had been hitting on her at a bar—with the almost-empty lighter she had fished out of the trash. You couldn’t use anything new, anything you had previously owned, in your prayer. That was the way the devotion worked: found objects. Discards. Detritus made holy by the power of the saint.
Jo
an took a drag off the cigarette, then coughed. She hadn’t smoked since her senior year of high school, and she’d mostly forgotten how. Thankfully, she didn’t actually have to smoke the whole thing. Cigarette burning, she walked three times around her prayer, then dropped the butt to the sidewalk and ground it out beneath her shoe.
Then she waited to see if her prayer would be answered.
Other people waited too, scattered along the sidewalk where the saint’s first miracle had occurred, with their altars of refuse and found objects, prayers graffitied on walls or spelled out with the noodles from last night’s lo mein.
The rising sunlight arrowed between the buildings and began to make its progress down sidewalks lined with prayers. This was how it worked: if the sun covered your prayer, illuminating it, the saint had heard you. There was no guarantee of an answer, but at least you would know you had been heard. For some people, that was enough.
If your prayer caught fire, if holy smoke curled up from its surface as the sun shone down on it, that was a sure sign you had been blessed. Heard and answered, and your intention would be granted. A miracle. If she just had a miracle, things would be better.
Joan didn’t need to watch to follow the progression of the sun. Cries of disappointment and frustration were common. Gasps of joy and gratitude much rarer.
Everyone had theories about how the saint chose to grant prayers. Some said it was whether she liked the altar or the things you used to make your prayer. Others said she could feel the need in your heart and mend your broken life that way. Joan hoped it was the latter, since it wasn’t like her hasty scrawl and filthy cardboard were that impressive. Certainly not compared with what was next to her—a salvaged player piano, painted with neon daisies, tinkling through a double-time version of “Music Box Dancer.” Though really, Joan hoped the saint had better taste than to pick that one.
She tapped the toes of her left foot on the sidewalk as she waited, just below the cigarette. Maybe it was bad form to be impatient about a prayer, but Joan didn’t care. She just wanted to know. Plus, she really had to pee.