Our online issue “Bloom” is full of incredible and surprising pieces of fiction and creative nonfiction. Authors brought their unique spins and voices to the theme: some stories are rooted in nature while others are blossoming with metaphor, wild and daring and brilliant. Let’s hear how author Daniela Alfaro was inspired to write her emotional short story “Silent Fire” published in DRP’s online issue “Bloom” in Summer 2025.
Silent Fire began with an image that wouldn’t leave me: a neglected greenhouse, glass shattered, ivy crawling in through the roof, and the air heavy with the scent of something burned. I didn’t know who the greenhouse belonged to yet, or why it had burned, but I knew it was more than a ruin, it was a metaphor for something personal and unresolved.
At the time I wrote this piece, I had been thinking a lot about the silences that grow between people who love each other but can’t seem to say the right words. I was looking at my own family history and realising how many relationships are defined not by what’s spoken, but by what’s left unsaid. I wanted to capture the ache of that, the way love, resentment, and regret can live side by side, tangled like roots beneath the surface and left neglected like old buildings.
The mother-daughter relationship came naturally. I’ve always been drawn to the complexity of familial love and how it can be tender and brutal in the same breath. The greenhouse became a physical space to explore those contradictions: a place that once held beauty and life but also neglect and destruction. The fire in the story is both literal and symbolic, a single act that is destructive, intentional in part, but also strangely freeing.
The writing process was immersive but emotionally heavy. Once I knew the story’s emotional destination, the letters became the key and they allowed me to braid past and present together, to let the mother speak in a way she couldn’t in life. Writing those letters felt raw. I wanted them to feel contradictory, because real people rarely love in clean, uncomplicated ways.
The biggest challenge was restraint. There’s always the temptation to over-explain a character’s motives, but I wanted the mother’s inner life to feel like something the reader had to piece together from fragments just as Marisol does. That meant cutting scenes I loved, paring the dialogue back, and trusting the spaces between words to do some of the emotional work.
Ultimately, Silent Fire became a story about grief, but also about inheritance. Not of property, but of temperament, silence, and survival instincts. It’s about the strange intimacy of discovering someone’s truth too late, and the choice to grow something new from the ashes they leave behind.
Thank you for reading!