Unreal City

Do you fall in love with the city in Kat Howard’s new short story, or does it fall in love with you? ~ Julian and Fran, April 16, 2023

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Unreal City

By Kat Howard

You don’t remember the precise moment you first slipped into that other city. You’ve thought about it since—how could you not?—but even with everything else you remember about that visit, you don’t remember how it began. You were walking through your own city, in a rush to catch the subway, and then you were just . . . there. The transition so seamless that you didn’t know it had happened until your eyes were caught by an unfamiliar skyline.

There are other things, now, that you don’t remember. Pieces of your life before that city took up residence in you. And memories that are there, but are flat, photonegatives of themselves. As if your life and your memories are reversed. As if you exist in fragments.

The Cathedral

You never have learned its name, but that’s how you think of it.

The building is unlike the others in the city, with their modern lines and hard angles. It doesn’t have the same glass and chrome regularity that in your city once signaled modernity and now demonstrates unimaginative sameness.

Instead, it looks Gothic. A secular cathedral, stretched closer to the heavens than any of its medieval cousins could have imagined. Gargoyled and buttressed, its windows like paused kaleidoscopes, all color and shape.

The building has no obvious door.

It’s said, in that city, that if someone finds their way into that building, they will learn their possible future, but that this is the easy part—they must find their way out again before it will come true. Others say that the building only opens for those it recognizes, the ones who are supposed to be allowed in. Still others say that the building has no need of doors, that it is not a place designed to permit access, but a mausoleum, long abandoned. That the lights that illuminate its windows are only signs of hauntings.

You have tried to get close enough to the building to see for yourself if there is some hidden hinge or stone that—when pushed—will cause a door to reveal itself. But whenever you go looking for it, you always find yourself on the wrong street, or farther away than you thought you were, or exiting the subway car back in your own city.

The Ghosts

You do remember the first time you saw the ghosts. You hadn’t been able to sleep, and so you had gone for a walk in the late summer night. You were crossing the street, and between one curb and the next, you stepped into the other city. The reason you noticed was the sound: no longer the muted hum of late-night traffic, but the high, clear reverberation of ringing bells.