Ex-Voto
Flash fiction · May 2026 · 373 words
Themes: corroded theology, Catholic ritual, grief, ex-voto, Mediterranean Gothic
He carries the wax heart inside his shirt, against his skin. The body’s warmth has softened it between the car and the chapel, and now, when he takes it out, it has the shape of his hand — four fingers along the bottom, the thumb to one side, where he’d pressed without meaning to. Wax holds.
The chapel is empty. The door creaks. Inside, it smells of rancid oil, damp wall, dead flowers. Someone has left a bouquet at the foot of the image. Already gone. The petals have dried on the altar; they powder when the draft comes in behind him.
The ex-votos hang on the left wall. Eyes. Legs. A child’s small hand. One breast, two. A head. The old wax has yellowed; some are grey with dust, others have fallen to the floor and no one has hung them back — they’ve stayed below, one on top of the other.
His wax heart is new. It shines. Still smells of honey.
He hangs it on the hook. The soft wax yields slightly under its weight. There it stays, dactyloscopic, marked with what he is. The other ex-votos hang without hands, anonymous; only his has a shape.
He doesn’t pray. He has nothing to ask for. He should have done it before, when it still served, and he didn’t — not from disbelief, not from anger, only from the laziness of habit, because tomorrow, because tomorrow. Tomorrow came and was not for asking.
He goes out. The door creaks on the way out too. In the parking lot, the sun is hard. He looks at his fingers: the wax has stayed under his nails, in a half-moon that will take weeks to come out. He’ll wipe his hand on his trousers. Won’t help. He’ll wash it under the tap. Won’t help.
He drives downhill. The wax will harden on the hook, in the cool of the chapel, and his fingerprints will stay there, recorded. When someone new comes — in a month, a year, ten years — they’ll see the heart with a hand printed on it, and might think there were two deaths. That one of the living wanted to take the other with him, and couldn’t, and only took the shape.