fictional

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.

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.

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.