Queens of All the Earth by Hannah Sternberg Page B

lunch, but Lenny insisted that food in any area near a major tourist site was embarrassingly overpriced. “Only tourists eat near a tourist attraction,” she said.
    On the second approach, they entered the church, and everyone, including Lenny, handed over seven grudging euro to explore Gaudí’s unfinished temple. Construction of the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia had begun in 1882, and it was still being built today, over a hundred years later, funded entirely by donations and alms. Twelve bell towers, a soaring interior, and eye-numbingly complex façades of unique sculpture were all molded into Gaudí’s surreal, oozing style. Tourists were allowed into certain mostly complete sections of the church, but its wide-open interior allowed glimpses of the ongoing work as well.
    Olivia stood under the contorted, fibrous, yawning stone mouth of the main door, newer by construction but older by design than the dense clockwork of the gothic cathedral. It was primordial, gaping, almost horrifying in its thick-set power. It reminded her of the monsters in her books, and she felt the heroes’ fear—an empathy that had faded long ago once she’d learned the end of every adventure.
    “Come on,” Miranda said in her ear. “We don’t have time to stand around. Let’s go inside.”
    After taking the same picture on three cameras, they walked inside, into a forest only Olivia could see. Among the solemn oaks of the Cathedral of Barcelona, she had felt like a girl among ancient monoliths. Here she felt like an ant or a beetle buried deep between the stalks of fertile lotuses. Unfinished as the church was, the scaffolding which filled it became a part of the artwork and caught the colored light of two stained-glass windows—red, blue, green—like spider webs at dawn. The spiders, in bright yellow reflective vests, climbed up and down them.
    Marc thought of the streets where he had grown up, the yawning buildings a giant mouth penning him in, tendons stretching to swallow him whole, and rendering the sky insignificant. He had had terrible claustrophobia as a child. Sometimes his bedroom seemed too small, like a shoe that would never fit.
    Now, in the cavernous church, he didn’t see the vast spaces—only the walls. He thought about the things his mother had done to help him escape his fears—games of imagining he was somewhere else, games of imagining he was some one else, some little boy who wasn’t afraid.
    Lenny saw a sea cave she had once visited with a local guide in Greece. There with three other travelers, she was the last to scramble out of the boat and onto a ledge to explore. As the guide reached up to help her out, his hand slid lower down her back.
    He was old, with chipped yellow teeth that framed the holes in his smile. She felt a wave of disgust, and suddenly wished she were home, back in the house her parents had finally bought in Colorado after she’d gone away to college, once her dad had retired. It was the first time she had realized she couldn’t remember what the bookshelves in her Chicago apartment looked like, or the other houses on the street where her family had lived when she was in middle school.
    But the moment had been fleeting. At every new sight, the other tourists loved asking her what it was like to be a travel writer, so Lennyhad no choice but to be one.
    Miranda didn’t see much at all. She didn’t really like modern architecture.
    As they skirted the interior, looking up silently and separately, their imaginations moved to complete its construction. They passed right by the large signs describing the building’s history.
    Without conversing, they planted themselves neatly at the end of the line for visiting the roof. There was only one elevator, which took tourists up to the top of a bell tower with a spectacular view.
    “The sign says the wait is an hour,” Olivia said quietly to her sister.
    “But it’s on the list,” Miranda said. “I think you’d regret not going.