fiction stories

The Pigman: 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 second one is called “The Pigman” by Paul Zindel.

The Pigman

Called me “The Pigman” since I worked with pigs. Told me I stank like one too. Always kept away from people. They wanted nothing to do with me anyhow. Only went into town to do my shopping but noticed sometimes, the shopgirl looking at me extra-long. I figured it was because of the stink.

I wanted to say sorry. She looked sweet. The type you’d figure for an angel. The kind of girl you didn’t expect to see working at a grocery store but want to take out to dinner.

But I was just The Pigman. What’d I know about women?

I had a wife once.

She left me. Not because of the pigs. She understood what it meant to be a farmer’s wife. Naw, she got bored of me. Told me I didn’t have a personality anymore. That it must have dried up when our boy Charlie died.

Ain’t that what happens to folks though? When someone dies, a part of you just goes with them?

Anyway, this shopgirl had sad eyes. She looked like maybe she’d understand some things. Maybe she’d be okay with quiet. Maybe we’d listen to music and hold hands.

I’m not just The Pigman, after all.

“Hey,” I said to her one afternoon after she bundled all my groceries together into a sack. She looked at me with those sad, green eyes. She looked like she wanted to say something back.

“Yeah?” she said finally, her voice soft.

“What do you do for fun?” I asked, keeping my voice low. Felt like maybe I could spook her. I didn’t think I smelled bad. Got a shower before I left the house, but maybe there’s a lingering stink. Pigs are clean animals though, you know, unlike what folks think.

Her lips twisted up into a smile. “I like to dance,” she admitted, “but usually, my feet are sore after work, so sometimes, I just like to listen to music.”

“Maybe,” I said, then hesitated. I gnawed the corner of my cheek. “Maybe we could listen to music together some time. I’ve got a good little setup. Nothing too fancy, but some keen speakers. A decent sound system.”

“Yeah?” she answered back. “I think I’d like that.”

I nodded. “Great. Stop by my farm. It’s the only one on top of the old hill. You’ll find your way.”

“Hey,” she called as I was leaving, “what should I call you?”

I prayed she wouldn’t call me Pigman – not to my face or behind my back.

“How about my name?” I suggested. “It’s been years since anybody’s had the decency to do that.”

Her smile widened. “Of course I’d call you by your name. I’m asking what your name is, you old goose.”

It was my turn to smile. Maybe she didn’t know me as The Pigman. Maybe she just didn’t know what to call me. “Jonathan,” I told her, “call me Jonathan.”

“And I’m Penelope.”

Jonathan and Penelope.

I could get used to the sound of that.

Isabelle Palerma

According to Kaitlin Oglesby, The Pigman is banned in places like Texas and Missouri because of alcohol use and partying, scenes involving abusive family and manipulation, and due to language.

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

Draw me a Star: a Short Fiction

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

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.

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.

An Avocation for Breathing

A story with a protagonist whose perspective requires an associative, free-flowing use of language.

inspired by Friederike Mayröcker

Her 1988 story “my heart my room my name,” was written entirely without punctuation, which inspires the breathlessness of these pieces by not utilizing punctuation.

vignette i: breath

When I took a course on modern poetry at a university where classes were taught in crumbling brick buildings with decaying ivy and windows held together by glass glue the professor told me that a comma is an inadvertent signal to the reader to pause to take a breath and that by writing long sentences we are forcing our readers to draw in their breaths sharper deeper like they are swimming or more accurately drowning but this isn’t a poem modern or otherwise this is me introducing you to who I am so I’m sure you’re asking who am I why is my story something special but it’s not it’s not I don’t know how to convince you otherwise but that summer I turned nineteen my breathing was sharper deeper and I thought I was drowning but instead I was swimming yet no-one told me that I was in a hotel pool not an ocean like I had come to believe and every time I tried to swallow everything shimmered at the edges like a dream sequence or a hallucination but I was not dying I was not dying and you told me I was beautiful I was beautiful but I thought those were just words you said to a corpse because I was so sure I had said the same thing to a body in a glass case in a museum near Pompeii because I was so sure I had said the same thing to my grandfather’s body in a cherrywood box in a funeral home down the street from his empty house but no one told me no one told me what you’re supposed to say when someone dies but I was just a child the professor told me that a comma is an inadvertent signal to the reader to pause to take a breath but we’re not breathing are we?

are we?

vignette ii: love song

He asked me if I only write sad poems like elegies or church bells with missing clappers but I know I’ve written happy things whether they’re memories or fiction I’m not sure but this isn’t just a collection of all the times my heart was an explosive and detonated too soon and I hope you’re remembering to breathe because all of this is building up to a climax that’s not all that exciting yet I want to be the vial of peppermint oil that invigorates you when you thought you were dead yet I want to make you laugh so hard you feel like you can’t breathe but I can’t believe I’m jealous of a ghost and yet my memory isn’t what it used to be but I keep reading articles about our shrinking hippocampus and our galaxy expanding faster than it should and books about false memories like that will stop the onslaught the ravaging of my mind by that plaque that destroys but I guess you don’t realize how scared I am of forgetting what if I call you by the wrong name or what if I offer you a honeysuckle flower and you tell me it’s calla lilies and daisies you’ve always loved and I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is a love story even though it doesn’t sound like one because all I’ve wanted all I’ve ever wanted is to be your home and to be the vials of peppermint oil that invigorate you and yet I’ll write you poems until my ink well dries but he asked if I only write sad poems but isn’t love just a sad villanelle or a brokenhearted sonnet?

isn’t it?

vignette iii: exhale

are you still breathing?

are you?

vignette iv: lungs

Anyone who knows me knows my poetry is a catharsis and hears the truth veiled underneath the metaphors and listens past the rustling of tree leaves and knows there’s more beneath the surface and knows I’m more than my past because if you just look at the faded Polaroids and old cassettes you will see one version of me but there are so many layers so many layers like when you’re painting and you wet the canvas and layer one coat of acrylic over the top of another and some kind of masterpiece emerges and this is what it’s like to live some days I’ve heard neurodivergent voices refer to it as “masking” and while that feels applicable I wonder where does the mask stop once it adheres to the flesh because I feel like I’m crafted of papier-mâchépapier-mâchépapier-mâché and glue and I’m afraid to peel back the mask because what if what’s underneath is ugly it is ugly isn’t it and I’m afraid because people are often repulsed by what they don’t recognize and if I don’t recognize myself in the mirror does that mean I’m a monster and are monsters even capable of breathing when he stitched a man of mangled flesh and confiscated organs did he know he was building a monster and were those recycled vintage lungs of his creature capable of breathing because I forget to inhale and exhale some days because I forget to breathe some days because I forget to be human some days and am I a monster because I always told myself I was a Russian nesting doll but I forget to breathe some days and is this my punishment for being a bad daughter and am I a bad daughter because my mother often told me that I was a thorn in her side and thorns don’t have lungs

does this mean I’m a monster?

does this mean I’m not breathing?

A drabble is a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

He had vanished all those years ago. All I had left was a pressed flower and an empty pack of cigarettes to remember him by. He offered me a world I could not fathom, so I Iingered behind. I guess the dying don’t lie. I promised I’d wait. Last night, he reappeared in a dream only to say I miss you, and that was enough. His eyes told me every story his lips could not, and I told him I dedicated every song to him at every show. I told him about the lightning showers. And that was enough.

Every time the sun rises out her window, she’s at a split in her story. Autobiography isn’t etched in stone. It is impermanent like fingers caressing rivers or kisses in the rain. Everything is until it isn’t. Everything feels fabled until you see how easily the stories dissolve. They crumble in the rain. She tells stories of her youth about the boy who drew blueprints for a house he could never afford. About the taste of honeysuckle in June. She can change the narrative. She can be the new beginning her children never had. Just run and don’t look back.

When I say I want to be described as breathtaking, I hope he realizes I mean beyond what can be seen. I hope it doesn’t sound like I want to be the girl in the sundress among a field of wisteria with golden light. I want my words to captivate. My soul to catch on fire. I want him to look at me and see my aura ablaze. I want to write poetry and stories that stop people’s hearts. That makes them forget where they are. Forget how to breathe. My words could be as unique as fingerprints. Don’t forget.