Author: Isabelle Palerma

Draw me a Star: a Short Fiction

For National Short Story Month, I’m experimenting with writing more short stories.

Now, I’ve recently discovered that the United States’ current administration is slashing funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and continuing to ban more books by BIPOC authors as well as LGBTQIA+ authors.

As a result, I thought it’d be important to write short stories, based on titles alone, prompted by books that have been banned. I’m choosing to write based on fiction I haven’t read so as not to encourage the story I write.

This first one is called, “Draw me a Star” by Eric Carle.

I hope to do more.

Draw me a Star

They look like pinpricks, tiny little studs in a giant blue-black velvet canvas, and after so many nights of staring at them, Katherine looked at me and said simply, “Draw me a star.”

I didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t spoken in three months, and she sat there, staring at me like nothing unusual had happened. “You can draw me a constellation or a single star. I don’t care,” she continued, “just draw me a star.”

I looked at her, dumbfounded. “I just… you still speak?” I finally managed to squeak out.

“Of course,” she replied. Katherine was always the flippant type, but when someone falls silent for a quarter of a year, and then merely demands a drawing of a star, you’d be struck stupid too. But I wasn’t going to ignore her wishes. I took out a piece of paper and sketched the most beautiful star I could.

I made it glisten as best I could against the grain of the page, painting the page in cobalts and pthalo blues. Painting the star in metallic sheens, making it sparkle and glow.

I wanted Katherine to have the best star. After all, I didn’t know when she’d speak again.

As the paint dried, her eyes dimmed. I felt her gaze lose focus.

I wondered if I had lost her again.

“Katherine?” I said.

She smiled sweetly, but it was a distant smile.

My beautiful wife was gone again – like an astronaut on a space mission beyond where I could reach her.

I drew her a star, and she clung to it, but she herself was unreachable.

Isabelle Palerma

According to a March 2025 article by Lisa Tolin for Lit Hub, Draw me a Star is banned in school districts in Florida, Iowa, and Texas, and because of a naked couple meant to represent Adam and Eve have been supplied with paper clothing in other school districts.

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.

Love like Crimson, Eyes like Gray: a Short Fiction

May is National Short Story Month, so, coupled with a prompt from The Time is Now, please enjoy the following short story.

Guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2019, Anthony Doerr, discussed a list of dos and don’ts authors frequently hear mentioned when writing short stories. He described how much he loves when authors break those rules.

In the spirit of those rules, write a story that breaks some of the commonly suggested “rules” or suggestions authors get when writing a short story. (April 30, 2025, The Time is Now.)

Tell me I’m handsome. Tell me you love me. Tell me all the rules you’ll break just to be with me. Tell me you’ll leave your boyfriend just because you can’t live without me.

I know it sounds vain, but your lust is my elixir. I drink it up like the nectar of the gods. I gobble it down like it is the goddess’s ambrosia. Lying in your bed, watching the lazy rain droplets trickle down the windows, I know I’m where I’m meant to be. I don’t want to wake up. I want to stay here with you in this moment.

You say something stupid like, “But he’ll be home this afternoon. He comes back from his business trip today.” You tell me that every Sunday morning, and every 9 a.m., you break my heart by not wanting to spend your life with me.

I tell you how perfect we’d be together. I remind you of the way our bodies fit together like an open and closed parentheses, but sometimes, you close yourself off from me

like I’m a venom

and you haven’t found an antidote yet

like I’m a disease

and no one has bothered to search for a cure.

You stop me from telling you I love you. You stop me from telling you how perfect your curves are and yet, you’re the dream I don’t want to wake up from.

My eyes are gray from crying too much; I swear the color drained out of them, but you say I’m maudlin, you tell me it isn’t poetry I write you, it’s just sad.

You tell me I could find a girl at a coffeehouse or a bookshop. You tell me I could go to a record store. You tell me those hipster girls would love my photography and my poetry.

You tell me I need to leave you alone. You tell me that I need to stop dropping by, unannounced, that your boyfriend noticed my VW Bug down the street a few nights in a row. He mentioned it to you. He said something about the trampled sunflowers on the front porch.

The ones I thought were poetic and sad.

When I put a dead rat in your mailbox, you called the police.

When I started writing poems in blood, you put a restraining order on me.

But love has always been crimson, and my eyes have always been grey, even before all the crying.

Forgive me, my love. I must have crossed a line, but I just wanted to linger in your bed on a Sunday. I just wanted to hear you say that you loved me.

Isabelle Palerma

Rain, Changing Seasons, & Hiraeth: “Ghost Line” Poems

In March of 2009, the poet Rachel McKibbens introduced the poetry community to the concept of the “ghost line”. McKibbens defines the ghost line as “an inspiring line or image that becomes the unseen first line of a poem”.

The poet Ollie Schminkey provided their readers with a poetry prompt on April 9, 2025.

The prompt is as follows:

Use a line of a lyric from a song you have been listening to as a ghost line.

Here are a few more “ghost line” poems.

i: rain

These shapes I see in the darkness all conform
to your figure
and your cologne is like petrichor but faint.
I think if I listen to the silence long enough,
I can hear you whisper my name.
(Don’t tell anyone –
they’d think I belong in bedlam.)

But, as I trace raindrops along my windows,
I remember scribbling in my Latin book,
Amantes sunt amuntes –
lovers are lunatics –
and it doesn’t take the taste of rain to know
the truth.

I’ll continue to watch the raindrops trickle down
and chase shadows in the dark,
but I won’t surrender to the madness
because this is love and every silent evening,
I whisper to see if I can hear your echo.

ii: changing seasons

Here we are, chasing these temporary highs
like nightcrawlers leaning close to their radios,
begging for a fix,
but in a sad state of panic,
you told me you thought your blood froze to ice
(and you said you didn’t want to self-destruct
to stay warm).

I offered you a cigarette,
but you shook your head and said,
“I don’t want a solution for my problems –
just someone who can commiserate.”

So, we went outside in autumn
and watched the leaves change colors for a while.
You told me,
“It’s nice to remember that even dying can be
beautiful
for some.”

iii: hiraeth

Every broken bone I never set right
aches on me
as though I have been falling asleep in airports.
I’m never where I want to be
because I swear, I don’t know where I want to be.
Is it homesickness, even if you don’t know
where your home is?

I traveled a thousand miles from here
just to end up back in this wasteland
and I booked a train ride
out of town
because a girl with straw-blonde hair
read from the Rider-Waite tarot deck,
telling me to leave this city behind.

(But everything hurts when I remember
the details.)

I watch it all like it’s a dream.
I pretend it’s not my life,
but that has to stop.

Everything hurts like an unexplained car crash,
but even though I’m a thousand miles away,
I’m the one behind the wheel.
(And is it homesickness,
even if you’re already home?)

Isabelle Palerma

Spirits Follow Me Here, Too: a Short Fiction (Part I)

May is National Short Story Month, and in honor of National Short Story Month, I decided to write a short story combining my interest in tarot and witchcraft with fiction. I hope you enjoy the result.

For the past three years and seven days, I have carried a deck of gilded and black tarot cards in my worn-out messenger bag. My nonna had given them to me when I was seventeen but taught me to read when I was thirteen. “A gift,” she had told me, “every teen girl should know.”

She had warned me about the responsibilities associated with owning my own deck. She described the difference between the waning crescent moon and a waxing gibbous moon. She had braided my hair and wished to take me to find stinging nettle and mugwort. My nonna had wanted to collect crystals with me and to charge them under the full moon.

But she told me too, there were seasons for these things, and my season was not upon me yet. I was too young. By the time she felt my season was upon me, her cough had turned to blood and her hair was falling out on her pillow case in clumps.

Nonetheless, she tried teaching me. I listened, her voice enchanting me with its ebb and flow, but as she shuffled her tarot cards – the black and gold ones – I found myself ensorcelled by their haunting images.

Later, when the cancer ate away at the good parts of her, spirits rose like whispers in the dark. Before she passed, she taught me not just how to read the cards but how to cleanse them too. Her hushed voices spoke of the different spreads, her gnarled hands passing over the cards as practiced as a magician. Despite all my attempts with her, I still fumbled.

I wanted to make my nonna proud. I did everything in my power to become the witch she was teaching me to become, trying to train my gestures to be smooth as I read the cards, trying to keep the trembling out of my voice when I read for others.

After a few years, the cards became creased and a little worn, but my knowledge had grown. I no longer needed the paper with my nonna’s web-thin penmanship, but I kept it near as a reminder. As they passed over the cards, my hands were methodical, utilizing gentle, polished movements.

Though some interpreted my tattered cards as a sign of accumulated gifts, I just took it as a more storied past. After all, before they belonged to me, my cards were held by my nonna. Who knows what history those cards nurtured? When my mama kicked me out of our apartment at seventeen, I needed a job. Fast. And luckily for me, I found my calling.

A smoky jazz club called The Crow’s Nest had set up a small table for me to read my cards. They covered it with diaphanous scarves and told me to make myself look mysterious. I didn’t know how to make myself look mysterious but wore my dark black hair long and partially covering my eyes.

The club’s proprietor set the scarred table up with the fabric and a handful of stumpy candles. It was wedged between a small, makeshift stage, the bar, and the kitchen. He offered me a crooked grin. “You good, baby girl?”

I nodded.

People brought me strange gifts, hoping that by holding items that had belonged to their deceased loved ones, I’d hear their voices. And yes, their voices called me. From a wedding band, I heard a father beg his widowed wife to remarry. From a handkerchief, a great-grandmother reminded her great-grandchildren, the ones who scarcely knew her, to live.

But the tarot cards were where my heart belonged.

That first October night he set me up at The Crow’s Nest, I drew a single card for myself before anyone approached my table. One solitary card that would predict everything.

The Ace of Wands.

I nearly wept. The Ace of Wands has always represented the seed of potential, new ideas, and even though I didn’t know it at that time, the Ace of Wands would herald a new beginning in my future.

And right as I flipped the card to face me, that new beginning strolled into the bar.

The spirits around me danced, rustling awake from their tombstones, and resurrected from their sleep. I, on the other hand, simply felt the dust brush off my cards and knew it was time to begin again.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.

Softening, Out-of-Focus Romance, & Love Extinguished: Three “Ghost Line” Poems.

In March of 2009, the poet Rachel McKibbens introduced the poetry community to the concept of the “ghost line”. McKibbens defines the ghost line as “an inspiring line or image that becomes the unseen first line of a poem”.

The poet Ollie Schminkey provided their readers with a poetry prompt on April 9, 2025.

The prompt is as follows:

Use a line of a lyric from a song you have been listening to as a ghost line.

i: softening

Before they exhume our bodies
from this cold hard earth,
I will make a subtle plea,
begging you to quiet that nest
you have woven in your skull.
(Silence the birds or hornets or whomever
comes to roost
in the twigs and branches there.)

Before they dig our bodies
from this cemetery ground,
I will make a hushed demand.
Relax your body beside me.
Your skeleton is crafted of exquisite granite,
but I remember when it was bone.
Soften, my love,
and be still.

ii: out-of-focus romance

This twig and branch nest sculpture is home
to a part of me I have never named.
Creatures who blur the edges of memory
when a lover is involved.
(It’s not that I don’t remember –
it just becomes out-of-focus
like a dream.)

This is what happens when you have been raised
on tawdry romances and inescapable dreams.

*Photos via Yaroslav Shuraev, Daria Liudnaya, & Natalia Naitkevich.*

iii: love extinguished

These wraiths might not catch breath
as they dance along cobblestone,
but, so long as I am here
with you, my love,
none of the rest matters.

I have diaries scrawled with messages
of love,
dedicated to the creatures
who have blurred the edges
of my memories.

Yet I watch the apparitions
and know the truth.
I have you, and you have me.
(We are here among tombstones,
and love like ours cannot be extinguished.)