fantasy

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.

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 I)

You wake up in a strange city, in a bed that doesn’t belong to you, and you feel a strange tickling in your pinkie. You glance down – a small pair of turquoise and brown feathers are fluttering on your nail bed. “What the…” you begin to murmur, but before you can complete the sentiment, a stranger slides back into the bed beside you.

“Oh,” he says with a big smile, “you’re awake.”

You writhe around, trying to find a way to keep the stranger from discovering what you just found out for yourself – that over night, you’ve developed a tiny pair of wings.

You try to smile back, but the stranger recognizes how uncomfortable you are. “Would you like to freshen up?” he offers.

How magnanimous, you think. Maybe he has some nail clippers in the bathroom and I can just snip the wings off. You nod and hide your hands behind your back as he gestures toward the bathroom. You nod and scurry to the bathroom, slamming the door behind you. “Sorry,” you call over your shoulder.

“No worries,” he replies. At least he seems like an easygoing enough guy. You find a hairbrush and untangle your snarled hair. You make do without a toothbrush. Then, the most important reason – you start hunting for a pair of nail clippers.

You find them and easily snip the wings off, but even in the yellow light of the bathroom, they are oddly beautiful – the turquoise is the color of the ocean and the brown is even lovely, the shade of a wren’s feathers.

Even weirder is the pain that sears through you when you cut them off. Like a scorching, sizzling sort of pain. You bite back a gasp.

Then, the unthinkable happens.

The two tiny feathers that had been beating against each other grow back.

“You okay in there?” the stranger calls.

You are speechless but finally swallow your fears and call back, “Yep. I’m fine.”

You think about it. This is a stranger. You probably slept together. You don’t really remember much. The night is a little hazy. You are naked. You did wake up in his bed. He was naked when he came back to bed.

“Did we have sex?” you ask because why the hell not? That’s safer than asking him if he knows anything about pinkie feathers.

“I was that memorable, huh?” he replies, his voice teasing. “We sure did. Next thing you know, you’ll tell me you don’t remember my name.”

Shit. It’s like someone wiped your memory clean.

What is his name?

“You’re going to hate me,” you respond, your voice decidedly not teasing.

“I’m Micah,” he tells you, “and you can come out of the bathroom now. I know all about the feathers on your finger.”

…to be continued.

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.