In honor of Violet Lichen's upcoming collection, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction, out on November 18th, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to draw inspiration from our natural world. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top three. In second place was "Late Bloomer" by Nuno Gonçalves. You can read the piece and learn more about Nuno below! Congratulations to Nuno!
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"Late Bloomer"
By Nuno Gonçalves
There's still so much food left. I'm ashamed to tell you how much I've been eating lately. My skin is stretching over fat in places I never thought could swell so much.
But it will be worth it.
They've stopped cremating the dead. The bodies have just been piled in open holes. I'm having nightmares about the day the holes are full and the corpses overflow.
When the sun is high, the rotten fumes tinge the air orange. It can be pretty sometimes.
I just brought water, a knife, your ashes, and the seeds with me. The swamp is always hot and humid, but there's shadow at least. It's hard to breathe, maybe due to the excitement.
I take off my trousers and sit on the damp soil. My thigh... Eve, you wouldn't believe the size of my thigh! I trace a line with the tip of the knife. It doesn't hurt a bit. Nothing hurts anymore. I cut deep on my inner thigh, following the line, and open a nice pocket lined with blobs of fat.
I fill it with soil, your ashes, and the seeds, then cover it with more soil and tap it flat, as Mom used to do. Should we have listened to her? But run away to where? There's nothing left, is there?
I lie down. It's quite comfortable, you know? I won't need to eat for a couple of weeks. I have plenty of water.
It takes two days for the first flower to bloom. It happened in the middle of the night. You bloomed with a pop. It was like a star turning on in the darkness. You bloomed in my direction, so wide, with such a grinning happiness that you never had before.
I smile back.
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Nuno Gonçalves was born in Viana do Casetlo, Portugal, in 1985. He is currently an opthalmologist at the Hospital de Faro. He has published short stories in several Portuguese anthologies. In 2022, his first novel, O Pacto, won the António de Macedo Award. The same novel also earned him the Grande Prémio Adamastor de Literatura Fantástica Portuguesa in 2024. In 2025, he published a short story collection, ... e, felizmenta, não viveram para sempre and his novella, Reflorestação, won the X Prémio Anton Risco.
