The newest anthology I’m featured in, Horror en América and Beyond, has been released!
Here’s a small blurb about it:
Horror en América and Beyond is a chilling collection by some of the most talented horror and speculative fiction authors, poets, and creative non-fiction writers in the country. It includes terrifying tales by award-winning authors Pedro Iñiguez and Carmen Baca, poetry by Poet Laureates Edward Vidaurree and Juan Perez, and Creative-Nonfiction by the prolific Daniel Olivas.
Each story traverses the boundaries of horror; with topics so fiendishly taboo, yet deliciously mortifying, you’ll be tucking your toes under your blankets at night. With razor-sharp poems unveiling the horrifying nature of American violence, both supernatural and mundane. The non-fiction will have you question the horror of politics in America. This anthology will keep you in a stranglehold until the very last page, and leave you gasping for more!
As usual, you’re more than welcome to purchase it on your own if you’re interested in buying a copy or if you rather, if you’re on my mailing list, I can send you an autographed copy. I would just have to add in mailing expenses. Plus the bonus charge for my autograph. 🙂
Please feel free to let me know if this anthology is something you’d like to add to your collection.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I sent Killer of Creatures to three alpha readers and I’m about 34k words into a different novel. I know I should be working on the sequel to Killer of Creatures, but to be honest, I had to leave that on the back burner because I haven’t been feeling very funny lately.
Write a story based on a line from a movie. (June 28, 2025,Out of the Box Prompt.)
“The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her. Every day.” (Ricardo Morales from “The Secret in their Eyes”.)
Still frame from the film “The Secret in their Eyes”.
How can you forget the person you love? How can I have looked you in the eye morning after morning, kissed you good night and now, your name is all but a cypher. A code I cannot break. Everything I do, and yet I cannot conjure up the memories of you as I once did.
You are my love. In my notepad – the one where I jot my most important information into – I write your name over and over until it looks like a meaningless scribble, scrawled letters without any context.
I’m too young for this forgetting disease. But they told me it’s not the brain plaque like some folks get. It’s something different, and, of course, the doctors have explained it to me in a thousand different ways. Each time, I think I understand and I write it down, but when I try to read it later, none of it makes sense.
I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. It’s frustrating. I feel like a child, or worse, a lab rat.
Telling myself I’ll remember makes no difference. I always end up forgetting. Your name is just empty syllables. Even when I say it, it is ash in my mouth.
I want to curse, but all the words are the same. I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. When I look into a mirror, I scarcely recognize the woman I have become. When I pass you in the hall, you are a stranger. Weeping, I beg you to remind me who you are, who we were.
So, you do.
You don’t just say our names, but you tell the history of us. The way you kiss me like the very act of kissing would braid our souls together. You tell me how though you always loved me, you never married me.
At this, I feel my brows furrow.
You explain, “I never wanted to steal your wild. You were a flower I did not want to pluck from the earth.”
I feel myself smile. I feel myself soften.
I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of you I remember.
Often, you take me into your arms and dance with me, whisper about the scent of the seasons. Spring – honeysuckle. Summer – fresh vanilla. Fall – cinnamon and bon fires. Winter – impending snow storms. You say my scent is your favorite.
That I smell of autumn. I am a woman of cinnamon sticks and bon fires.
But I do not know why. I never wear perfume.
Yet you breathe me in as though I will save you. I begin to forget you.
One day, I struggle for breath. It’s hard to remember. These basic tasks. This remembering.
I gasp. The breath is fleeting. The memories are going, too. I want to say goodbye, good night, but I can’t even remember the breathing.
Eleven years is a long time. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, my love?
We watched the sun rise like a film strip from a movie, drinking Darjeeling tea, every morning. Every moment felt like magic. Her hair, like cinnamon and bon fires. Her skin left me breathless. Enchanted.
We whispered our secrets into the bottom of the kettle and into the shape of each other’s ears, like forming mists and watching them drift away. One morning, after telling my sins, I knotted her a dandelion ring, the only promise I ever knotted her. I asked forever.
Her eyes glittered with tears as she accepted.
It wasn’t marriage, but it was love. I thought when I said forever, I’d wake up with wrinkles etched in our faces. Eleven years is a long time.
She’s been gone, and graves are unyielding, unforgiving. The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her.
Every day.
Yet she was the one with the forgetting disease.
My mind is slowing, wading through the molasses-pain of grief, yet the anguish is thick and blurs the details. I wish I could remember, but maybe forgetting is safer. Numbness is safe. There’s a reason surgeons anaesthetize.
But I pull out our photo books. I find the videos I made and listen to her voice. Her lilting accent like a song. Her eyes haunt me, begging me love, love, love, even in memories I scarcely remember.
Forgetting feels safer.
Was she always crying out for help? Was she always begging me for answers?
I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of her I remember.
Isabelle Palerma
This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.
I did not come into this world quietly. My birth was not out of fairy tales but horror stories of blood and weakening hearts, mothers who felt torn apart by my cries. The shrieking of a baby who would not be silenced. Even in slumber, I begged for someone to love me. It was about love, about need. I always needed. It was something that seemed like greed to those who did not understand, but if I could vocalize those cries, I could tell them I was not born to be quiet. I simply had needs I could not put to words. Needs for love and attention. And now, as an adult, I still cry out, begging, at times, for love and attention.
In the early 2000s, I found myself really into the Beat era of literature and exploring that scene. William S. Burroughs is a local author who was popular in the Beat era. He utilized what is called the “cut up” experimentation method of writing. He learned this from a painter, Brion Gysin.
I have experimented with a stream-of-consciousness piece and cut up some of it and edited it into a poem.
The result is below.
All I had was birthdays and these trying few. My holding conversations, stories, constellations for why I’m running. Not writing or holding my breath. They wonder did we see lines like breathing sometimes?
Especially those I long to remember – the air of the lungs I journal about, things I am told to write of and the lover of which I am incapable of writing, the body he and me cannot share because air he loved like so (like need).
For to be a cigarette is something I wished. Smoking, gasping, and in his lungs deeply unbroken. You knew first: water. And do as philosophy, go to the depths. I finally dove but too deep.
When not gasping, you and I long for that sensation, holding your breath, holding my breath. And you’re punctuation. A wish for a concept. A wish for me. Let me be intimate, young. All I had was birthdays and these trying few.
With a concept from kiki_poetry, I am using a line of poetry from an Asian-American or Pacific Islander poet in honor of AAPI Heritage Month.
Today’s line comes from a poem by No’u Revilla, “When You Say ‘Protesters’, instead of ‘Protectors’.”. As per kiki_poetry’s instructions, I will italicize the line from “When You Say ‘Protesters’…”.
Every devastation you have granted me is one too many. I bleed, but only because you know where to stick the blade. We were taught love is a synonym for sacrifice, and paramour is on par with martyr.
So I opened my heart to you and gave you its contents willingly. But the ugly truth is in your mouth, even womb is wound, and my gift of love, of life, was never enough.
You looked at those with gray in their eyes and stenciled their names into your skin like it was a colossal act of heroism, but I was the one ripped open and never stitched back together.
Isabelle Palerma 