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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.

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 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.

Losing Annie: a Short, Short Fiction

A Stand-Alone Piece

Based on true-ish events.

The long days of summer are nearly behind us. I watch as the sun breaks through the cracks in tree branches high above Annie’s window, forming a pattern like lace, on the sidewalk. I look up into her window, wanting to throw a small rock at it.

Just enough of that quiet rat-a-tat-tat of the stone against glass to get her attention. But more than that, I want to be inside her home. In her basement where we had set up the vintage record player we brought for only ten bucks at a garage sale. Annie always bought the cool records too. Simon & Garfunkel. Credence Clearwater Revival. The Who.

Stuff I’d never heard of, but when I told her that, she had laughed and said it was all her daddy listened to.

I want to be in the basement, listening to the old records and drinking honey lemonade like we did last summer. But Annie’s window looks dusty. The whole place has been abandoned for about three months now.

I still remember it – the souring of my stomach when the operator told me that the Klein’s number had been disconnected.

I had asked my mom what it meant, but all she told me was that Annie and I wouldn’t be going roller skating this summer.

And I haven’t seen her since.

One day, she writes me a note. It has a return address of Wyoming. She says she’s sorry, but when her daddy has to move, she has to go with him. It’s what it’s like being the daughter of a man who works for the telephone company. I tell my mama this, and she laughs, but her laugh sounds sad. She says, “Annie sounds wise beyond her years.”

So, I write Annie back. I tell her it’s okay, just that summer is almost over, and that I miss her, and that I miss the beat-up, old record player we bought. But a few days later, the letter comes back to me.

“Return to sender” is stamped on the outside.

“She must have moved again,” my mama says, “maybe one day, you’ll find Annie.”

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.