A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  The sun crept closer, the light crawling over her ancient Docs. It licked up her legs, over her chest, illuminated her hair, a brief halo.

  Then paused, on the sidewalk again, inches from her prayer. Joan bit her lip hard. Come on, come on, come on, she chanted inside her head. Please.

  A drop of rain. Then another and another. The sky greyed, then grew storm-dark. Then opened, rain sheeting down. The worst of all possible signs.

  Soaked to the skin, Joan ran into a coffee shop. She shouted her order as she passed the counter so she could use the FOR PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY toilet. After she washed her hands, she rubbed the smeared mascara—waterproof, her ass—from beneath her eyes.

  Well then. No miracle. She would figure out something else.

  • • •

  The voices woke Joan the next morning. A crowd of people outside her apartment, congregating on the sidewalk, on the steps. She angled her head to better see out her sliver of window.

  There were the beginnings of altars, but these were made to honor some sort of saint she had never seen before—coffee cups and lipstick cases, worn Docs and tights with holes. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  Joan checked her Book of Hours, but there were no saints scheduled to appear on her street today. It wasn’t a feast day either.

  She shrugged into a thrift-store kimono, worn at the hem and wrists but its embroidered peonies still bright, and went down to see what the fuss was about, hoping she was wrong.

  Cries of “Our Lady of the Ashes!” and “Our Lady of the Lightning Strike!” greeted her as she opened the door.

  The people outside had smeared ashes on their faces, were waving scorched pieces of cardboard like holy relics. Most had painted their lips with dark lipstick. The front line of them fell to their knees before her.

  “Oh, fuck no,” Joan said, and fled back into her apartment.

  • • •

  Joan hadn’t been online to do more than check her email in over a week. Nine days ago, she had discovered that her (now ex) boyfriend was cheating with her (now former) best friend, which would have been bad enough on its own, but Joan had still been drunk and angry enough the day after to punch the asshole who liked to grab her ass when they were in the elevator together. Except. Said elevator was at work, and said asshole was her (now former) boss. Joan had gotten fired.

  On reflection, it had not been her finest twenty-four hours.

  In the wake of all of that, she hadn’t wanted to scroll through social media feeds full of pity and snark, or pictures of the happy new couple—because, of course, the best friend and the boyfriend were in love—so she hadn’t looked at anything.

  She did now.

  She had run fast enough ahead of the storm that she hadn’t seen it happen, but lightning had struck the cardboard on which she had written her prayer. Had scorched it, but had not consumed it. Even stranger—although the cardboard had been prayer-side up, her words had been seared onto the sidewalk, still in the same shade of elegant goth Chanel lipstick she had scrawled them in.

  Nothing else had been touched.

  People were already calling it a miracle. Apparently, every major department store in the city had sold out of Vamp, it was back-ordered online, and tubes were going for upward of $100 on eBay.

  Joan closed her laptop. “This is too weird,” she said. She looked out her window again. There were even more people out front. She shrugged into a hoodie and pulled the hood tightly over her hair. Then she slunk out of the back of the building, holding her breath against the stench, and very carefully not looking at the spatters and smears as she passed the dumpster.

  Things were even crazier on the street where she had made her offering yesterday. Her rejected offering. Because whatever this was that was happening, it was not how the Saint of the Sidewalks worked. No one had ever heard of her making a new saint before.

  Ash-smeared people wearing bloodred lipstick waved scorched pieces of cardboard. Some were calling out, “Saint Joan of the Lightning! Strike us!”

  Great. Not only did they know where she lived, but they knew her name. Joan pulled her hood tighter over her head and walked as fast as she could back to her building.

  • • •

  That was how saints were made. Some piece of strangeness happened, and it hooked itself in the heart of someone who saw it and called it a miracle. Once they decided that’s what it was, people tried to reenact the miracle’s circumstances. They ritualized its pieces. They named the person at the center of it, gave them an epithet, something memorable.

  The Saint of the Sidewalks had been a homeless woman, with a pile full of belongings, broken and worn. Perhaps relics from her previous life, perhaps more recent scavengings. She sat on it like it was her throne.

  One day, it caught fire. Spontaneous combustion, said the witnesses. Too hot and fast to save her.

  Except. No body was found. Surely a miracle, in and of itself. But then the stories started, saying that everything the fire touched had been made whole, restored. And so she became the Saint of the Sidewalks, her altars made of broken things, refuse her relics, and prayers sent to her in fire and smoke.

  • • •

  Joan did not want to be a saint.

  The crowd at the front of her building had grown even larger, and there were peonies, baby pink and fuchsia and striated with color, woven through the handrails on the front steps. Those gave her pause for a moment, then she realized—the pattern on her kimono. Scary, that that was all it took.

  The press of people was terrifying, the number of them, the fervency. She could feel the want, the terror and desperation, rising from them in waves. It made her dizzy, seasick, and again Joan slunk in through the back entrance, trying to remain unnoticed.

  Joan thought she heard someone yell her name, but she pulled hard against the door, not letting go until she felt the lock engage, and then ran up the steps to her apartment.

  She had forty-one new emails and thirty-six direct messages on Twitter, and there were 407 new pictures that she was tagged in on Instagram. She herself was in only thirteen of them. The rest were of her building, the lightning-struck sidewalk where her prayer was.

  Almost all the messages and tags were requests for prayers, for interventions, for help.

  Joan didn’t even make it through ten of them before she wanted to punch something—the world, maybe—and a few more after that and she was crying. Hot, angry tears, that these people were so desperate as to see her as their best option.

  She wasn’t. She didn’t even know how to fix her own life, much less theirs. The lightning had struck her prayer, not her—she had no superpowers. She was just a woman with a cheating ex, no job, and no coffee in her apartment.

  • • •

  Joan ordered in groceries and promised an obscene tip if the delivery person would meet her at the back. Nine text messages from her ex came in while she waited, all variations on how he was “So sry, bb.” Not sorry enough to type entire words, apparently.

  Plus, he was selling the cardigan she had left at his place on Craigslist, calling it a holy relic. He was also not sorry enough to just give it back to her when she asked him for it, the dick.

  Getting the groceries was a fiasco. The crowd of people had found the back of her building, and by the time she got back inside, three of her eggs were smashed, someone had stolen her grapes, and she had gotten smeared with ashes, her arms covered in people’s handprints. She wondered if yelling “Get the fuck away from me, you fucking freaks!” would make people see her as any less of a saint.

  She wondered if they’d see her as normal if they saw her hiding in her bathroom, wiping away tears, or if they’d just hold out vials to collect them in.

  • • •

  For some people, the saints were like candles bought at bodegas: a series of interchangeable names etched on glass, to be forgotten when the too-vivid wax burned down. They were the equivalent of love spells found on the internet, tarot cards bought
to be party tricks.

  If Joan was honest, that’s what they had always been for her. Even the intention that had gotten her into this mess—“I need a miracle”—had been desperation, not piety. In the darkest part of her heart, she hadn’t really expected anything to happen, even if the sun had immolated her request. She had hoped something would happen, sure, but the gesture had been more of a way to feel like at least she had done something, than out of any fervent belief.

  It was after midnight now, and raining, and there were still people clustered around the doors to her building. She had been braced all day for management to complain, but the message that pinged her inbox wasn’t a noise warning, but an offer of a month’s free rent. The publicity her presence generated had been a real boon. Oh, and he’d be happy to get her oven fixed too. (It spontaneously turned off after twenty minutes, no matter what temperature it was set to. Joan had put in the maintenance request three months ago.) He just had a quick prayer he wanted to send her way. Joan looked away from it. It seemed too intimate, to read what someone was praying for.

  There was a GIF of a lightning strike at the bottom of the email.

  Joan typed “Yes”—meaning the rent and the working oven—and copy-pasted the GIF because she didn’t know what else to do with it. She felt sick to her stomach. She wasn’t a saint, she wasn’t, but this had to be better than just ignoring the guy, right? She hit send.

  Blue-white lightning cracked outside her window.

  There was a crash. A scream. Then cheering.

  “Saint Joan of the Lightning!” they cried.

  She did not get up. She did not look.

  Joan sat at her computer, staring at the “message sent” icon, hands covering her mouth. I need a miracle, she thought.

  • • •

  This time, the voices that woke Joan weren’t from the chaos outside. They were in her head. People begging, beseeching: “Strike me with your holy fire, Lady.” “I cover myself in ashes until I am worthy of your light.” Other things she understood less—languages she didn’t speak, incoherent weeping. She sat up in bed and clung to her blankets.

  This was insane. She was no saint. She couldn’t answer prayers. Didn’t want the responsibility. Certainly didn’t want other people’s fucking voices inside her head.

  She opened up her laptop and started to type.

  • • •

  Turns out, once people decide you’re a saint, they’re reluctant to let you stop being one. They retrofit your actions to their desired narrative. So even though Joan wrote an explanation to her followers—ugh, that word—that she was just like they were, denied all ability to help people, to work miracles, they took her words as a sign of humility, of caring, of becoming modesty. The devotion to her only increased. She couldn’t walk anywhere without prayers reverberating in her head.

  The constant press of people sent her into trembling panic attacks, and so she lied, said that any unwanted physical contact would shock people, a result of the lightning that still passed through her.

  She’d picked the ability because she wished she’d had it around her grabby ex-boss. But the story spread, and people gave her space. Almost enough that she could breathe.

  Joan was never sure, after, how it had happened. If the man had acted deliberately or not. But there was a hand on her upper arm, and then there was a spark and snap, and then there was a man, flung backward, heaped up against a wall.

  Joan stood, frozen to the spot. The man scrambled to his feet, then prostrated himself before her on the sidewalk. Already, the branching tattoo of the lightning strike was visible on his skin. He apologized and begged her forgiveness.

  She gave it to him, of course. That was what saints did.

  • • •

  “It gets worse, the more they believe in you, not better.” The woman sat on a stoop, bright fuchsia sequined Converse scattering sunlight from beneath the hem of an unbelted cream trench coat. “All the supernatural bullshit, I mean.”

  “How do you know that I—” Joan started.

  “You look haunted. Hollow. Like people have been biting off pieces of your insides.

  “Plus, you’re all over the internet. Our Lady of the Lightning Strike.”

  There was a clink as a piece of a shattered flowerpot replaced itself, making the terra-cotta whole again. A sensation like flame passed over Joan’s skin.

  Down the block, a flat bicycle tire refilled itself, and the bent wheel of a homeless man’s shopping cart straightened.

  Refuse made whole. Tiny, spontaneous miracles of proximity, accompanied by the heat of flames that did not consume what they touched. Joan felt pretty sure she knew who she was sitting next to.

  “Right. Of course. What do you mean, ‘it gets worse’?” Joan plucked at a torn cuticle, worrying the skin until it bled, then winced at the pain.

  “The more they believe, the more you become a part of those beliefs. Or did you think hearing voices and being electric were just talents you picked up?”

  Joan shook her head. “Does it stop?”

  “Maybe. If you’re lucky.” There was longing in the woman’s voice.

  “I only wanted a miracle,” Joan said.

  The woman stood up, her shoes blinding in the sun. “And what makes you think you didn’t get it?”

  • • •

  For the first time in her life, Joan desperately wanted to pray. To pray fervently, devotedly. To light candles before an altar, to obscure the sand of a mandala with her feet.

  And she couldn’t. Every time she opened her Book of Hours, every time a text alert popped up on her phone to notify her of a holy day, she thought of someone else, trapped by the weight of people’s desires. Someone who, like her, could not sleep without being woken by voices raised in prayer, who could not leave their apartment without becoming the unwilling head of an impromptu pilgrimage.

  She couldn’t pray, not when doing so might trap someone else.

  So she left. Joan wasn’t sure if you could abdicate sainthood, but she would try. She hoped that if she could just get far enough away from the ecstasy of belief, find somewhere that people didn’t know her face or care where she lived, she could go back to being normal.

  She dyed her hair in her sink. She left in darkness. She used the last of her tube of Vamp lipstick to scrawl “Do not Look for me. I will not be Seen” on her mirror, and she left the door to her apartment wide open.

  She did pack her peony-covered robe. She really liked it.

  And then she ran.

  • • •

  Far, far away from where things had begun, Joan watched as the devotees of Saint Joan of the Lightning staged a service in her honor.

  They wore masks now that completely obscured their eyes, so that they could not accidentally see her. It had been that, more than the distance, that had helped—she could grocery shop in peace, most days, and usually the people who recognized her only thought she looked familiar. They didn’t quite know why. And if she had peony plants in her yard, well, so did most people. She stood out less, having them.

  She watched on her laptop screen as people slicked dark lipstick over their mouths, then wrote their prayers on pieces of cardboard and pressed them to the sidewalk. She thought she saw a pair of fuchsia sequined Converse walk through the crowd, and she smiled.

  Joan felt the hair rise on her arms, felt static electricity crackle across her skin. She would hear the voices—she had learned to listen without going mad, to separate out the pleas—and when she heard people asking for their own miracles, she touched her screen and struck their prayers with lightning, burning them to ash, letting hope rise up like holy smoke.

  She was very careful to choose only the most specific prayers. She knew very well that without direction, miracles were never what you expected them to be. She observed those who called out in her honor, and touched her finger to the computer screen. In a crackle of lightning, at a distance, a prayer was answered.

  Maiden, Hunter, Beast


  She had never intended to be a nineteen-year-old virgin. She wasn’t opposed to the idea of sex, didn’t think the simple act of having sex with someone had to be a big deal, and sure, she went to Mass and knew what the priests taught, but she figured God was actually a lot less concerned about that sort of thing than they were. She just hadn’t ever wanted to badly enough.

  Which, since there was an actual fucking unicorn walking down the alley outside her apartment, seemed in retrospect like a really good decision.

  Not that she really thought unicorns cared about virginity either. It was pretty clear from the art and the mythology surrounding them—the hunt for the unicorn ending with its horn in a lady-maiden’s lap—that the whole “unicorns only like virgins” thing was just another way the patriarchy policed women’s sexuality. If unicorns cared so much about virginity, where were the pictures of unicorns with their heads in the laps of dude-maidens? That was what she wanted to know.

  That wasn’t exactly the point right now, though. What with the unicorn being here. Which was amazing. And maybe it would still be here even if she’d screwed her entire high school football team and then had an orgy with the cheerleading squad as a palate cleanser. But whatever the reason or the rules, a unicorn was here, and she could see it.

  She climbed through her window and clattered down the fire escape. Then stopped at the bottom, pinned by its gaze.

  • • •

  The unicorn raised its head and saw the maiden. It held her gaze as it swayed on its feet. Tired, so tired. It had been running forever, it seemed. Running to find itself here. This great forest of steel surrounding it, its feet aching from asphalt and concrete. Endless.

  It stepped toward her. This was almost finished. It could rest. An end was all it wanted, and she was an end made flesh.

  Then.

  A crash. A clatter. Shouting. The maiden ran up the side of her building and disappeared.

  The unicorn ran too.