By Victoria Hrvoic

Edited by Alloe Mak

The first time I visited a cathedral, I cried. 

I was eleven years old. It was like entering a different world, an isolated microcosm. The cathedral was polished and gleaming, nestled within a crumbling city that was tattooed with old graffiti and spiderwebbed cracks. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder with abandoned houses and sagging apartment complexes, vestiges of soulless Yugoslav architecture. The cathedral looked as if it belonged in another city. A richer, kinder, better-kept city, with tourists and fancy restaurants. I was wrong. Cathedrals thrive in decrepity. It would have starved amongst wealth. But here, it gorges itself. 

I drift into the cathedral’s mouth mindlessly, stupidly, like a moth yanked towards a flame. Beholdent in its bug-eyes is a beauty worth burning for. Curlicues of stone drip from vaulted buttresses; the unforgiving sun fractals through the stained-glass ceiling. The church itself looks like an unhinged jaw, cavernous and magnificent. Gaping, yawning, devouring, it swallows up all who wander inside, absorbing and digesting them. The cathedral is a carnivorous creature; it is spoiled and knows nothing but consumption. Its hulking body drooling gemstones and precious metals, golden blood oozing through fat, overstuffed veins. Steeples jutting like vertebrae; gargoyles like countless hydra heads. 

Cathedrals are the product of the devotion of thousands. As I stand there, my grandfather tells me of a man, then his son, and then his son’s son, who all worked on the gargantuan mosaic that now splashes across the ceiling. None of them lived long enough to see the finished product, but they toiled anyway in poverty. They worked until their vision fuzzed and their fingers swelled with arthritis. They were buried beneath the cathedral, my grandfather says. The ground pulses under my feet like an open wound, sticky with their blood. The cathedral belches as it settles atop their bones, satiated. 

I tell my grandfather that his story makes me sad. Those men gave themselves to this tiny part of the cathedral, and now they are nothing but scraps of rotten flesh beneath it. They could have done something better, I argue. They could have found fame with their talents and grown rich. I prepare for a lecture on the sanctity of one’s eternal soul and how praise in life is inconsequential when compared to eternal happiness in heaven, but he simply gives me a pitying look. The wrinkled lines of his face limn with condescension. He tells me that I will never be happy, because I will never know God. 

I stand in the middle of the cathedral for what seems like hours. At first, I see only what the cathedral wants me to see—wooden pews and polished stone walls. But as my eyes sweep over the innards, sift through the guts, it all melts away until all I can see is fear—so plentiful that I choke on it. A cloven-hoofed demon sneers at me in a tapestry; verses from the old testament crawl along the floor, spitting up fire and brimstone. In the mosaic above me, angels sound their trumpets as the seventh seal is opened; plague spills forth into the world, a tide of blackened flesh and lost teeth. God’s judgment is made palpable. The cathedral nibbles at the corners of my mind. Sculptures and stitchings of sheep watch me with wet human eyes. Amongst the chaos, they crowd timidly behind their shepherd, who I think might be Jesus. They look up at him desperately. 

Is this God? 

When I think of God, I think of angels. Not of the rosy-cheeked haloed sort, but of the ophanim and the seraph; the kind with a thousand, bulging eyes that rotate on wheels of galgallin, with griffin’s heads protruding from bushels of feathery wings. The kind that commands you to be not afraid, because, otherwise, you would be. I think of Eldritch horrors that exist beyond our comprehension—that thrive amongst animal terror and thwart our desperate attempts to explain the unexplainable. I cram the body of Christ in my mouth and it tastes like blood and bile and ash. God is fear made divine. 

As I stood there, in that cathedral, I felt it: I felt the suffering of millions. The desperation lurked in every carving, every brushstroke, every tile of that mosaic above me. The buzzing of locusts filled my ears. I hear, in the distance, animals screaming—the pounding of His hammer on their flesh. The noise sounds too human. Is it an animal that cries, or a person? What’s the difference? 

The cathedral ate well that day. It leeched that hind-brain caveman terror from me, parasitic. It reduced me to an animal—to a lowly lamb desperate for a shepherd. It reduced me to cathedral food. 

We are cathedrals; bodies are cathedrals. Hulking structures stuffed with the ornate craftsmanship of a million organisms—our mere existence is an act of worship to the forces of our creation, with eyes instead of stained glass windows and flying buttresses for ribs. We stumble against each other, arrogant, ignorant arcs of flesh like peeling paint, like carved walls set ablaze from within, a thousand candles flickering with a thousand prayers sent up to heaven, so inhuman that I hesitate to even call us such things. And I think, for a moment, that I understand how artists were able to conceive of the ophanim and seraphim, because I think that might be us. 

I stand in front of a mirror. An animal peers inside and an angel stares back. The animal fears the angel because it does not understand; it bows and grovels and promises in its wordless language that it will build a cathedral in the angel’s honor. The angel watches with its countless, bulging eyes, and eats and eats and eats. I stand between them, both cathedral and cathedral food, and I weep.