Academic Review
Mulrooney, Melanie. “Bloom Where You Are Planted.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #451, Science-Fantasy Month 8, 19 February 2026.
I. Introduction
Melanie Mulrooney’s short story “Bloom Where You Are Planted,” published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #451 as part of the magazine’s annual Science-Fantasy Month, arrives as a tightly constructed work of speculative fiction that deploys botanical metaphor to interrogate questions of bodily autonomy, class stratification, and queer identity. Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a market long associated with literary secondary-world fantasy, provides an apt venue for a story that operates simultaneously as world-building exercise and political allegory. While Mulrooney does not yet command the scholarly bibliography of contemporaries such as Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler, “Bloom Where You Are Planted” demonstrates a thematic sophistication and symbolic coherence that warrants serious critical attention. This review argues that the story achieves considerable literary power by mapping systems of reproductive labor and social control onto the body itself, using floriculture as an extended metaphor for the commodification of femininity—while simultaneously staging a queer romance as the site of genuine resistance and liberation.
II. Summary
The story is narrated in the first person by Eleni, a young woman living in a dome-based society in which girls and women grow literal flowers from their skin, the species and quality of which determine their social rank, economic utility, and geographic residence. When Eleni’s sister Amelia produces a coveted rose, the family is relocated to Rosoideae, an elite dome community. Eleni herself eventually blooms dandelions—a flower long believed eradicated and classified, like the coltsfoot grown by her neighbor and romantic partner Brix, as a weed. Brix’s flowers are repeatedly shorn by her own mother to prevent “contamination” of other gardens. Together, Eleni and Brix plan to escape to Asteraceae, a community beyond the Scent Authority’s jurisdiction where wildflowers are permitted to grow freely. The story culminates on Scattering Day—a seasonal ritual during which mature gardens release their seeds—when the two women openly display their blooms and flee the dome, releasing their seeds on the wind as an act of defiant joy.
III. Critical Analysis
A. Themes: Body, Labor, and Hierarchy
The story’s central conceit—that women’s social worth is encoded in floral growths on their skin—functions as a literalization of what feminist theorist Silvia Federici has described as the historical enclosure of the female body as a site of reproductive production (Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004). In Mulrooney’s world, the Scent Authority operates as a regulatory apparatus that certifies, classifies, and monetizes women’s bodies. Eleni’s mother harvests hibiscus blooms from “other garden girls” in a facility, long after her own garden is depleted—a detail that evokes the logic of industrial extraction applied to persons. The roses, meanwhile, serve as “a display breed, meant for adornment and appreciation,” underscoring the bifurcation of female value into utility and spectacle, a distinction Le Guin similarly examined in her social science fiction (Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974).
The phrase that titles the story—”bloom where you are planted”—is deployed ironically. Eleni’s mother offers it as a counsel of acceptance and gratitude, but the narrative systematically dismantles this ideology. For Brix, blooming where one is planted means enduring the forced removal of one’s flowers; for Eleni, it would mean suppressing the very exuberance of a dandelion. The title thus operates as a subverted aphorism, transformed from pious consolation into a critique of enforced contentment within unjust systems.
B. Form and Style
Mulrooney employs a retrospective, intimate first-person narration that allows for immediate emotional access while maintaining a controlled ironic distance from the society being described. The narrative moves with efficient economy across two temporal registers: the backstory of family and social initiation, and the more compressed present tense of the Scattering Day escape. This structure mirrors the story’s thematic movement from constraint toward freedom.
The prose style is notably sensory and grounded. Brix “smelled like salted licorice”; Eleni’s first flower brings “a tingle of energy… like electricity—an awakening, a definition of alive.” Mulrooney’s imagery consistently conflates the botanical with the erotic and the emotional, a technique that refuses the dehumanizing logic of the story’s world, which reduces the body to its horticultural product. The moment when Brix touches Eleni’s newly sprouted leaves—”my leaves reached toward her, unfurling like she was the sun”—is simultaneously a scene of sexual awakening, botanical description, and declaration of love, its three registers perfectly superimposed.
Symbolically, the dandelion carries particular resonance. As both a persistent weed and a plant with deep folk medicinal and nutritional histories, the dandelion represents resilience, democratic abundance, and value that institutional systems fail to recognize. Eleni’s discovery that she was “one last seed out there looking for a home” positions her not as deficient but as rare—a survivor of eradication. This reframing echoes critical race and disability scholarship on the pathologization of difference (Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, 2009), applied here to floral taxonomy as a stand-in for normative social classification.
C. Characterization
Eleni is a sympathetically rendered narrator whose defining quality is her capacity for critical thought in a world that rewards its suppression. Her interiority is rich and self-aware; she recognizes her mother’s performative acceptance and her sister’s masked unhappiness without condemning either woman. This generosity is the story’s ethical center. Brix, though rendered primarily through Eleni’s adoring perspective, avoids the trap of the idealized love interest through specific, memorable detail: the cherry pits flicked toward the dome’s edge, the deep and bitter laughter, the “unbreakable courage” that Eleni identifies and returns to across the narrative.
Amelia is the story’s most structurally interesting secondary character. The revelation in the penultimate scene—that she has known of Eleni’s plans and quietly protected them—retroactively recontextualizes her apparent passivity throughout the narrative. She is not the unreflective conformist Eleni assumes; she is a person who has made a different calculation about survivability and sacrifice. Mulrooney resists the temptation to rescue or condemn Amelia, allowing her final ambiguity (“Perhaps change will be good for Rosoideae. Or perhaps not”) to stand as the story’s most honest acknowledgment of the limits of individual resistance.
D. Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Context
The story participates in a long tradition of feminist speculative fiction that uses bodily allegory to explore patriarchal systems of control: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s botanical metaphors in Herland (1915), Margaret Atwood’s medicalized female body in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and N.K. Jemisin’s geological embodiment in The Fifth Season (2015) are all relevant precursors. Within the shorter form, the story recalls Kelly Link’s and Sofia Samatar’s work in its willingness to take its fantastical conceit with complete earnestness, allowing the metaphor to bear the full weight of its political implications without deflation.
The queer relationship between Eleni and Brix is written with naturalness and assurance, neither foregrounded as transgression nor rendered invisible. In the context of speculative fiction’s ongoing negotiation with queer representation, Mulrooney’s approach aligns with what Alexis Lothian has called “queer worldbuilding”—the construction of alternative social arrangements in which heteronormativity is denaturalized not by argument but by narrative architecture (Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, 2018).
IV. Evaluation
The story’s principal strength is the disciplined coherence of its central metaphor. Mulrooney never allows the botanical conceit to become merely decorative; every significant development—the rose’s certification, the coltsfoot’s forced removal, the dandelion’s revelation, the Scattering Day release—is both literally and allegorically resonant. The emotional climax, in which Eleni and Brix open their shirts to the manufactured wind and release their seeds together, is earned rather than sentimental, made possible by the patient accumulation of detail that precedes it.
If the story has a weakness, it lies in the relative thinness of its world-building beyond the central metaphor. The mechanics of the dome society—its economics, its governance structure beyond the Scent Authority, the nature of the “plains” outside—remain suggestive rather than developed. For a short story, this is a forgivable economy; readers interested in the world’s fuller elaboration may find the brevity limiting, though it is equally possible that the contained focus is a deliberate aesthetic choice that lends the work its lyric intensity.
The story is also, in certain respects, formally conventional. Its structure—awakening, romantic partnership, escape—follows the bildungsroman arc with minimal deviation. Mulrooney’s originality resides not in formal experimentation but in the precision and resonance of her metaphorical imagination and the warmth of her characterization. This is not a negligible achievement; within the constraints of short speculative fiction, a thoroughly realized central metaphor is a sufficient basis for literary distinction.
V. Conclusion
“Bloom Where You Are Planted” is a work of focused and emotionally intelligent speculative fiction that uses the language of botany to conduct a serious inquiry into bodily sovereignty, social taxonomy, and the conditions of resistant selfhood. Mulrooney’s dandelion is a quietly radical symbol: a flower that flourishes precisely because systems designed to eradicate it are never quite thorough enough. In Eleni and Brix’s final act—releasing their seeds into a wind that will scatter them beyond the dome’s jurisdiction—the story suggests that liberation is not only personal but generative, capable of seeding futures beyond the reach of the institutions that presently forbid them. The story’s thesis, that the impulse to bloom cannot finally be contained by any authority, is enacted rather than merely stated, which is the mark of fiction doing its proper work. For scholars of contemporary speculative fiction, feminist theory, and queer world-building, “Bloom Where You Are Planted” offers a compact but rewarding object of study, and Melanie Mulrooney’s career merits continued attention.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1915. Pantheon Books, 1979.
Jemisin, N.K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Harper & Row, 1974.
Link, Kelly. Stranger Things Happen. Small Beer Press, 2001.
Lothian, Alexis. Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility. New York University Press, 2018.
Mulrooney, Melanie. “Bloom Where You Are Planted.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #451, 19 February 2026.
Samatar, Sofia. A Stranger in Olondria. Small Beer Press, 2013.