fantasy short story

The Golden Compass: 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 one is called “The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman.

The Golden Compass

‘Whenever you are lost,” Papa whispered to me, his voice near vanishing in the noise that has surrounded us, “you can find me using this.”

“Using what?” I asked in reply, but before he could answer, I felt the heaviness in my pocket as he had slipped something into it.

I almost spoke, but he hushed me. I almost took out what he had suggested to find him with, reaching into my pocket, but he stopped me. “Not yet,” he said, his tone stern.

And with that, it was as though the northern winds had uprooted him and pulled him from my very side. The chatter, too, that had surrounded us faded to a faint murmur.

I pulled the gift – if you could call it that – from my pocket. A golden compass.

Papa appeared. “Lana, I haven’t even been gone three days yet, and you’re already summoning me?” he scolded me.

How had three days already passed?

As though reading my mind, Papa explained, “Time moves differently when we lose someone. When they die, grief alters the way time flows. Sometimes, days blur together into weeks. Other times, hours crawl agonizingly slow. It can all rush together because there’s no one around to remind you.”

It was weird, but that hit deeper than I expected. Grief had punched a hole in my chest, and I didn’t even know that I had lost him completely. I figured he was just another state away, maybe on another trip.

But dead? Gone? I didn’t know how to process this. And all the noise was back too.

“Were you feeling lost, Lana?” Papa asked, his voice feeble yet familiar. It was as though he were speaking directly into my ear.

“I am now,” I admitted, tears streaming down my face. “I didn’t know you died.”

“Oh, my sweet, death only kills my body. My spirit is in this compass, and that’s the good part. Don’t lose this compass, and you’ll always have me.”

I nodded but still felt disoriented, even though the compass pointed in the direction of home.

Isabelle Palerma

According to several sources, including Reactor magazine, The Golden Compass was banned in several places because of its promotion of atheism and attacks against Christianity.

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

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.

A Seraphic Metamorphosis: a Short Fiction (Part III)

You dress hurriedly, button your shirt hurriedly, and you run.

You run without thinking. You run home. You run past your doorman. You run into your apartment. You run into your girlfriend’s embrace. You run into the smell of her shampoo. You run into her open arms.

And you cry.

The wings are gone.

But in their place, you feel a small pair of wings flapping on your neck. You slap the back of your neck as though bitten by a mosquito. Shiloh looks at you, surprised. You have no answers for her, but you loosen your hair from its ponytail to hide the feathers.

You discover quickly you’re molting. You’re losing feathers, and laughing lightly, Shiloh scoops up some black feathers that trail behind you wherever you go. “Did you sleep with a dark angel?” she teases.

You don’t reply. Maybe they’ll just fall out on their own. But still, you feel the wings beat against the back of your neck. You hope beyond hope she doesn’t notice them. The dark wings should blend in with your hair.

But still the question remains – why? Why have they appeared?

You wonder what is happening to you.

Micah said he had answers.

You have to find him again.

You need to know what’s going on.

But first, you must go to your mother.

As you rush to the hospital with Shiloh, she tells you more of the details. Normally, lyrical, Shiloh is short with her words. “They thought it anxiety,” she explains, “she couldn’t slow her heart. Your mom isn’t the anxious type. She still can’t get it to slow.”

“A heart attack?” you wonder.

“They don’t know.”

“You seem distracted,” Shiloh confronts you in a way that is unlike her, “is it the dark angel?”

“Something like that,” you admit.

***

A few hours later, as you are walking out of the hospital room and toward an intern, you feel a strange sprouting sensation at your ankle. You yank up your pant leg and see a handful of ivory feathers clustered into a thick wing fluttering in the cool, sterile breeze. Luckily, Shiloh is glancing at her phone, and the only other person around is a beautiful intern pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

She smiles at you, her grin radiant, and blushing, you pull your pant leg down. Hopefully, she didn’t see anything. But the damage is done – you feel the swift quivering of the wings on your skin.

At first, you think it’s something fleeting and embarrassing – something akin to an erection. But when Shiloh and you make love that evening, you notice the wings fade. They don’t return that evening.

Or the next morning when you awaken to make her waffles for breakfast.

However, you do notice something odd, when you walk into the hospital to visit your mother, a new set of wings have grown on your eyelashes. Luckily, they’re black and curl up near the corners of your eyes, so they blend in with your eyelashes, but you feel their every movement.

And they appear only when you’re talking to your mother’s cardiologist.

She’s sweet, but unassuming. She wears a white lab coat and plain scrubs, and an engagement ring. But when she smiles, you think she seems nice. And you wonder what it’d be like to be her wife.

That’s when you know the wings aren’t a strange, sexual thing.

But when a new pair appears on your pinkie just like the first time, you grow curious. The same colors too – the lovely turquoise and brown.

Micah reappears as well.

You have so many questions for him, but he does not speak. He merely walks with you. He follows you to a coffeehouse. One you have walked to several times.

But this time, when you see Jacqueline, the barista, your heart begins to palpitate, your hands grow sweaty, and your lips feel dry. You have so much you wish to say to her, but you have lost the nerve.

You stand outside the coffee shop, heart in your throat. That is before you see your reflection in the window. That is before you see the six foot tall pair of wings the color of milk attached to your shoulder blades, glimmering and shimmering like stars.

You gasp.

“It’s never been about lust,” Micah whispers, “your seraphic metamorphosis. It’s been about love.”

end.

Isabelle Palerma

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

A Seraphic Metamorphosis: a Short Fiction (Part II)

You take a deep breath, not sure whether to believe this man named Micah, but what choice do you have? You cannot stay locked in his bathroom with a pair of nail clippers forever.

As you trudge out of the bathroom, he offers you a weak smile – not the generous grin from before. “You’re not a mutant,” he says, as if that’s going to make you feel any better.

“Gee, thanks,” you mutter.

He shrugs. “I’m trying here.”

That’s when it hits you with all of the strength of a bullet train. Yes, you might have slept with Micah last night, but you’re in a relationship.

Your girlfriend won’t be mad. She probably is sleeping with someone else too, but she will be jealous you slept on silk sheets and the guy you slept with has a bidet, which probably cost more than your rent and monthly utility bill.

Anyway. You should probably hurry back to Shiloh, but right now, you have more questions than answers, and he’s out of bed and making eggs that smell to die for.

Finally, you say, “What do you mean you know all about the feathers on my finger?”

He turns to you, flipping the omelet. “I mean,” he says in a pedantic tone, “I know what they are. Why they showed up.”

You want to find out more. Your mouth is watering. You’re hungry. You’re not sure if you’re hungry for details or for the cheddar-and-ham omelet he is preparing like a three-star Michelin star chef. But before he can elaborate, your phone begins to blare your familiar melody, “A Seraphic Metamorphosis”, by your favorite band, Compensated Endeavor. He grins and grabs you by the waist, grinding against you.

You smile, the tiny wings on your pinkie fluttering. Sheepishly, you jam your hand against the skin of your hip, wishing you were dressed. “It’s my ring tone,” you mumble, “I better answer that.”

Shiloh’s voice floods your ear, breathless and frightened and small, “Hey,” she says, “it’s your mom. Something with her heart.”

You listen to her breathing and can hear your own heart whooshing in your ear. This is not good. You look down at your hand – the flittering feathers have vanished.

Like they were never there at all.

… to be continued.

Isabelle Palerma

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