JOY FLORENTINE

Genre: Horror
Content Warnings: Gore, Child Loss
Honourable Mention in the Fear Flash Writing Battle 2025

Father takes a break from his work, and we eat together. His gaze digs for intact bricks among the shattered slate tiles, cracked beams and burnt thatch. Father’s eyes are always either up or down.

I wish he’d look at me.

‘I need more mortar,’ Father grunts. 

Mortar’s my charge. Father trained me at the riverbank kiln. It’s rough labour. Not a young woman’s duty, in peaceful times.

‘Limestone’s scarce.’

‘Find more.’

‘The mine collapsed. I can’t!’

‘You must.’

Arguing isn’t wise, but I’m stubborn. ‘Must you continue? Assaults haven’t stopped; they’ll destroy your work—or worse, kill you.’

‘Six generations of masons rebuilt this city through every war; I’ll be damned before I forsake our family’s home while it still stands! We are the stones of this city!’ 

Father’s devotion to rebuilding our war-torn city is a death sentence. Despite our shattered wheelbarrow, he persists, dragging his bricks around in the hemp fishing net I found by the river, patched with rope and leather.

Truthfully, I admire him.

At midday, I scour the area around the collapsed mine for limestone. As I shove aside a pile of jagged stones, I notice a hatch beneath a cracked stone slab. Straining, I remove the slab. 

The hatch groans open.

A fetid rot bursts from the hole, worse than any corpse I’ve smelled. There can’t possibly be anything good down there, but I can’t turn up empty-handed.

I go fetch a torch, inhale deeply, and climb down.

It appears to be an old, long-unused entrance to the mines. There is a single cart on rusted tracks that ends at a walled-off tunnel. When I peer inside, I find not limestone, but a leather-bound book. A journal. With my sleeve pressed to my nose, I read.

Its first entry marks the start of the First War, over 127 years ago. A husband’s reflections on an invasion, the pregnancy of his wife, and hiding deep in the mine. Months spent hoping for peace. But when he falls ill, his entries change. To unfathomable formulae and diagrams and desperate wishes for his wife to live on. 

Forever.

A guttural sound makes me turn sharply.

Right behind the ladder lies what may have once been a woman. Long, lifeless strands of hair fall around sharp shoulder bones, wide, pale eyes rolling in her skull. She’s naked, a circular symbol carved across her shrivelled breasts, dried black blood smeared around the cuts. Dry guts spill out of her cut-open belly. From it runs a flesh-like grey navel-string, scarred with deep cuts. It’s attached to a creature no larger than my fist. It squirms in the dirt. Its skin is brittle and colourless. What looks like its face has collapsed inward, and a series of dreadful, rasping sounds erupt from a tiny mouth hole.

Is it crying?

I retch and shove the journal into my breeches. Eyes pressed shut, I flee up the ladder and slam the hatch back shut.

Weeks pass, and what I witnessed haunts me. When our limestone runs out, Father resorts to clay. But another assault on the city devastates his efforts. Though I plead for him to stop, Father fills his net and starts over.

I study the journal again and again. A husband, desperate to save his wife and the child she carried, made her immortal. But after his passing, the entries end. How long into hiding until the woman realised her child didn’t grow? She cut it from her belly, hoping to end its life, to save it, yet the navel-string would not give. Even as she wounded herself and clawed at the string, the connection couldn’t be severed. A child and mother, forever attached, doomed to never die.

What if…?

Heart hammering, I reach for Father’s net and quietly start unloading bricks.

When I step off the ladder, the immortal and her child are as I left them. Having been trapped in the dark for over a century, she must have lost her mind and sight long ago. Nothing reaches her now, not even the light of my torch.

Pushing through the foulness, I lift mother and child into Father’s net. They’re lighter than a bucket of clay. As I carry them through the ruined city streets, the net’s hemp cuts into my shoulder.

At Father’s rebuilding grounds, I take the immortal out and place the child in her lap, resting on her exposed insides. But as I watch the child squirm, guilt coils in my stomach. I take it, wrap the navel-string around it, and gently place it into its mother’s open belly. Her flesh is stiff, yet wet, around my knuckles. Then, I gather up the mother’s insides with both hands and use them to seal her belly the best I can.

Is this what love feels like?

With trembling hands, I begin my labour.

Come daybreak, Father scowls as he finds me still on his grounds. ‘You took my net!’

‘Fetch your hammer,’ I say.

‘Why?’

I place my hand on the wall I’ve built through the night. ‘Smite it down.’

Despite his misgivings, Father strikes the wall with his great hammer. The wall doesn’t shake. He strikes again, harder, but still the stones hold fast. Father strikes on, unyielding, and my chest tightens. What if the impact somehow has the immortal regain her mind? Or if the child starts crying? But nothing stirs within the wall, and Father eventually gives up, heaving and rubbing his wrist.

It has worked.

Father’s hand glides over the brick and clay. ‘But how?’

‘Every stone attached to this wall will forever stand,’ I say. ‘Together, we’ll rebuild this city, stone by stone, and make it immortal.’

Father’s laugh is a rare sound. ‘I’d be a fool to question a miracle. The Gods have gifted you a true mason’s touch.’ He walks along the wall and lifts his net from the ground. As he presses it into my hands, Father looks at me.

He looks at me.

‘It is yours, my child.’