dark fantasy

The Ugly Word for Rebecca: a Short Fiction

Ever since I met Rebecca, I vowed to never separate ourselves. To be entwined with her. But to be inextricable to the one you love can be seen as unhealthy, Mother said. So I found times where I’d be away from her. Brief pockets of time.

And yet, even when I was away, I found myself thinking of her. I remember the first moment I first saw her. I was walking down Main Street, and I caught a glimpse of her through the window of the dress shop. I had no excuse to go into a dress shop naturally, but I remember fumbling around and telling Penelope, the dressmaker, something about my mother’s upcoming birthday. I had muttered something about wanting to surprise her with a dress, but the whole time, my eyes were on Rebecca.

She didn’t even look like she belonged there. Her gaze haunted me, and I suppose Penelope noticed the way I stared, my eyes lingering over Rebecca. She chuckled a bit, and then acknowledged my brazen desperation, my lascivious desire. “That’s Rebecca,” Penelope told me at the time, “bring her home if you’d like.” Shaking her head, she added, “The girls these days think wooden mannequins like Rebecca are outdated.”

Mannequin?

What an ugly word for my queen.

I ignored the jab and bought my mother’s dress, the pretense under which I came to see my newfound partner. Once purchased, I scurried out and hastened home.

Of course, Mother turned up her nose at Rebecca. Mother has always been a snob. I supposed Rebecca wasn’t haute couture enough for her, in her simple tea-length dress, but I found her stunning.

Mother and I still lived together, but she often stifled me, tutting at my choice in books or television. Sometimes, turning up her nose in the food I brought home from the grocer.

But now, Rebecca.

I put my foot down. I told her I loved her and I loved Rebecca. That she had to respect our love.

She scoffed but did not reply.

Finally, I heard her mutter something about wooden mannequins under her breath.

There was that ugly word again. Mannequin. Rebecca and I retired to bed early that evening.

I touched her tenderly as we lay in bed. On her back, she stiffened as I murmured, “I noticed you didn’t touch your dinner.”

Reproached by her silence, I kissed her cheek and said good night.

The next morning, I helped Rebecca out of bed. It was cold outside, so neither of us felt like getting up, but we knew we needed to. I brought her tea, but she didn’t drink it. I offered her coffee, but she wouldn’t speak.

Finally, as the three of us sat at the table, Mother suggested I get groceries before the snow started coming down worse.

I looked toward Rebecca, hoping she would join me – or at the very least, acknowledge me going into the snow storm. She punished me with silence. I hugged her tightly before I left.

I whispered to her, “I love you.”

The ensuing silence stung and as I reached the door, I wiped the tears from my eyes as she stared at me blankly. It was as though she had no emotions toward me whatsoever, but I knew that couldn’t be the case.

We’d shared such a connection.

“I’ll be home soon,” I assured her.

Mother rolled her eyes.

***

As I unpacked the brown paper bags from the back of our station wagon, I smelled the smoke. Mother must have found some firewood around back and made a fire.

A part of me was relieved. The warmth would be nice.

I placed the bags on the Formica counters in the kitchen and began to organize the groceries, inhaling the deep woodsy smell as I did. Jars of pickles and blocks of cheese. Deli meat. Loaves of bread. Eggs. Cartons of milk. Everything I could think of.

I didn’t remember anyone dropping off firewood yet this year, it occurred to me, as I was putting the deli meats in the refrigerator. Then, I grabbed a jar of pickles, ready to pack them away until we needed them when I thought to check on my mother and Rebecca. That’s when the thought occurred to me.

The ugly thought.

The one I kept telling myself not to think.

How Penelope told me and my mother told me and how everyone laughed at me because Rebecca was a wooden mannequin.

And in that moment, I remembered without a shadow of a doubt we didn’t have firewood.

But we had an ax and my girlfriend whom my mother despised.

The only thing left when I got to the fireplace was my mother prodding Rebecca’s head deeper into the fire. My beloved’s eyes twinkled from the flames as my mother giggled with glee.

“Turns out,” my mother said, laughing, “your girlfriend is good for something.”

Isabelle Palerma

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

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. Here is Part I.

Immediately upon seeing her, I knew she was everything I was not. She let light in places where I had locked myself in the dark. It was a bar, and though Dennis knew I was only seventeen, he also was more than happy to look the other way if patrons chose to buy me drinks.

When she sat down at my table, I had already been watching her. She had been raucous – loud and unmistakable. I saw her at the bar, munching on some of the peanuts Clifton, one of the bartenders had put out before the bar opened. She drank beer from a green glass bottle and spoke in a hearty voice as though she knew everyone, and they certainly knew her.

By the time the band hit the stage, she was already swiveling her hips as though she had grown up at The Crow’s Nest, and for all I knew, she had. Then, exhausting herself, she plopped down at my table. At first, I don’t think she even noticed me. I didn’t have a client and I was doing a spread for myself. A simple Celtic cross.

She had been gulping down a dark liquid from a glass when her bright, curious eyes caught mine. And, as cliché as it sounds, something altered. What was hard in her softened. What was loud became gentle. What could not stop fidgeting – froze.

She slid me a green glass bottle like the one she had been drinking from. It collided with the cards I’d drawn out on the table.

“Oh, Jesus,” she exclaimed as the beer foamed, threatening to spill over onto my cards. She scooped up the bottle just before its foamy head splashed onto the deck, but this girl, this tornado, looked bewildered nonetheless.

She chugged a big gulp of it down. “I don’t even know if you drink,” she admitted, “I just saw you sitting here alone and wanted to buy you a drink.”

I cleared my throat and gestured toward the tarot cards.

“Oh,” she replied, sucking in on her lower lip and furrowing her eyebrows. “Solitaire?”

“I do tarot readings,” I corrected, staring into her intense brown eyes. They were riveting. Such a deep shade of brown, they could almost black. I could hardly distinguish her pupils from her irises.

For the second time, she said, “Oh,” but this time, she sounded startled, “I’m sorry. I know last month, Dennis hired a palmist and some fire eaters. He had to downsize and let the fire eaters go. They got to be too much of a liability. Are you trying to work? Should I go?”

I laughed. “You can stay.” I piled the cards I had drawn and shuffled them back into the fold. I inhaled deeply before closing my eyes for the briefest of seconds. “Would you like me to do a reading for you?”

“Yeah, and how much is that going to cost me? Just a down payment on a new house and my life?” She smirked.

I arched an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she muttered, “my grandma poisoned me against psychics. Said y’all are a bunch of swindlers and con artists.”

Rolling my eyes, I replied, “You can pay whatever you like or nothing at all. My nonna taught me how to be a witch, and it’s just being in tune with your own gifts. So, maybe next time, don’t swallow the poison,” I suggested.

She nodded, flinching slightly at the barb of my words. “Can we start again? I’m Vee.”

I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Vee. I’m Nikita.”

And the spirits giggled for they knew, this was the beginning of something much bigger than me.

Isabelle Palerma

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

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

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.

News!

My poem about my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s is being published in an anthology, Forgotten Fragments of Time, to raise money and awareness about the disease, and I just found out a small press has accepted Catching Dreams, my debut novel!

They want to publish my book. My baby. The one that has been formulating in my mind since I was twelve and having vivid dreams about my grandpa after he died. The book that all began because I kept asking myself, “What if?”

They want to publish it. I never thought I’d be a traditionally published author, but here I am with a contract coming my way.