Short Story Competition - Overall Winner: 'El Cuenco de Castañas', by Naomi Duarte

SHORT STORY COMPETITION WINNERS 2026 

 The Ministry of Culture Award – Overall Competition Winner 

 Winner: Naomi Duarte with ‘El Cuenco de Castañas’ 

I used to believe that speed could outrun hunger, that if I ran fast enough through the corridor the heat in my palms would not blister. Abuela had just slit las castan as with the small, precise knife she kept for such tasks, scoring cada shell with a cross as if marking them for resurrection. Mi hermano y yo ran beneath the orchestic anthem of La Champions League, water sloshing over the rim, a dull percussion against porcelain like muted bells. It baptised the floor in brief, shining arcs that would later dry into nothing, leaving no evidence of our urgency.   

It seemed impossible then that something so smooth and self-contained could hold such sweetness inside it. They looked like small animals sleeping, their shells reflecting the weak bulb light in brief, defiant flashes. If I had known that memory would one day behave like that bowl; tilting, spilling, refusing containment, I might have tried to run slower. But children are never custodians of the future, they are its acceleration.  

I pushed open the tin door. At the top of the steps in el patio, Grampí  presided over his improvised architecture: a precarious tower of pans, stacked with the ingenuity of someone for whom making do was embedded in identity. Most things he touched bore the quiet signature of hands that understood the grammar of screws better than words. Smoke threaded its way out between the seams of his invention, carrying with it a metallic and sweet aroma of roasting chestnuts, like iron remembering it was once part of the earth. Heat has a way of revealing what patience alone cannot—it commands that what is hidden declare itself.   

The air tasted of labour and anticipation, of something about to be shared.  

Fireworks had begun splitting the sky beyond the tight weave of Upper Town roofs, their detonations ricocheting off stone, insisting on being felt in the ribs. The bursts illuminated the whitewash and peeling paint, the faces of los nietos seated along the steps, their profiles briefly carved in silver before returning to shadow on this cold November fifth. As children we flinched and then laughed, as though courage were something that could be rehearsed in increments. This type of beauty, luego lo entendería, is often accompanied by violence—not crueldad, pero fuerza, the kind that startles you into awareness.  

When the first chestnuts were handed back down wrapped in paper cones, they burned through the thin barrier y pienso que el amor, often arrives like that; too hot to hold at first, demanding adjustment. Pero no one retreated to a corner to perform the small surgery alone. We leaned towards one another, our fingers blackening as we split the shells, lifting away the bitter inner skin that clung stubbornly to the flesh beneath. You held one for me while I loosened its seam; I steadied yours while you worked your nail under the thin membrane that refused to surrender. Hubo algunos fáciles, chestnuts that seemed to have been waiting all along for release in compliant spirals, their interiors pale and intact. Y luego estaban the ones that resisted, whose bitterness announced itself early, whose layers adhered with a quiet hostility that made you question si the effort would be worth it. Even then, before I had the vocabulary for it, I felt that I was being initiated into a more complicated arithmetic of affection: that not everything yields at the same pace, that tenderness sometimes demands persistence.  

Y just when I think I have mastered it, the inner skin de uno peels back and reveals something dull and slack, a darkened sponge where there should have been golden firmness. “—Ay que asco,” one of our cousins says, leaning in with a grin that is half horror, half delight. “Uno podrío.” Podrío. Rotten. Said with the authority of someone who has seen corruption before. We crowd around it anyway, because disgust, like sweetness, is communal. Nothing in its surface had betrayed it. I turn it over in my fingers as if another angle might redeem it.  

“Bite around it,” dijo el abuelo, practical, hopeful. “Quita lo malo.”  

So, we tried—an attempt to rescue what remains, to salvage sweetness from the perimeter. But the bitterness spreads quickly with an aftertaste that refuses correction. The rot is not local. It has travelled inward with intention. The worms, invisible and diligent, have reached the centre first. There is nothing to do but leave it there in the paper, a soft collapsing thing cooling in the night air y pelar otro.   

The fireworks crack above us again, each explosion a brief manifesto against silence, each cascade of light a reminder that splendour is inseparable from disappearance.  

The spoiled one is folded into el papel and set aside, not condemned but acknowledged con pena. The fire does not falter because one centre has darkened; my grandfather adjusts his tower of pans with the same concentration, smoke rising steadily as if nothing in the world has shifted and we still had wonder to experience.  

Eventually the fire lowers its voice. The sparks thin. The wrappings empty. We were left with sore nails, sweet mouths and a patio that today holds only its own echo. I remain within this single night, refusing to step beyond it into what came after, the bans, the absences, the quiet dissolving of traditions like Guy Fawkes, because everything I needed to know was already present in that bowl we carried too quickly through the corridor. Spilling, colliding, sweetness yearning and sometimes betrayed. But love is not the guarantee of an unblemished centre, it is the willingness to keep peeling. I have seen since then how rot travels. How it moves through families the way worms moved through that chestnut—patiently, invisibly, until the centre decomposes. I wonder which withers first—the rituals, or the people.  

The fire will always go out, but somewhere in the body, the hands that learned to work together will remember the warmth. 

Judge’s comments: The smell of roasting castanas and the figure standing by the ‘precarious tower of pans’ is woven into the very essence of Gibraltarian life. As the summer passes and you begin to smell the smoke on street corners it is an indication that autumn is closing in. This writer has recreated that scene perfectly in their childhood patio. Their turn of phrase in ‘marking them for resurrection’, ‘muted bells’ and water ‘baptis[ing] the floor’ sanctifies the ritual and honors the memory as something hallowed. The short story successfully runs a deeper subtext under the familial scene: one of love, and perseverance and human connection. This writer’s use of language is lyrical and impactful, and yet accessible with the use of Llanito is woven naturally through the text. It feels like a childhood story that a friend might recount, and yet reads like literary fiction.