The Bluestocking 2022-23

Victoria Hrvoic | Grade 12 Cathedral Food 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 a polished, gleaming gem, 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 road outside had been churned up by years of unmitigated abuse; tire tracks sliced through it, old scars left by the tanks that had rolled past twenty years pri or. 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 it gorges itself here. I drift into the cathedral’s mouth mindlessly, stupidly, like a moth yanked towards a flame, beholding in its bug-eyes a beauty worth burning for. Curlicues of stone drip from vaulted buttresses. I look up at the ceiling, crusted with whorling mosaic and stained glass, through which the unforgiving sun fractals. The church itself looks like an unhinged jaw, cavernous and magnificent, gaping, yawning, devouring—swallowing up all who wandered 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 grandfa ther tells me of a man, and then his son, and then his son’s son, who all worked on the gargantuan mosaic that 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 limned 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, 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