short 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.

Love like Crimson, Eyes like Gray: a Short Fiction

May is National Short Story Month, so, coupled with a prompt from The Time is Now, please enjoy the following short story.

Guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2019, Anthony Doerr, discussed a list of dos and don’ts authors frequently hear mentioned when writing short stories. He described how much he loves when authors break those rules.

In the spirit of those rules, write a story that breaks some of the commonly suggested “rules” or suggestions authors get when writing a short story. (April 30, 2025, The Time is Now.)

Tell me I’m handsome. Tell me you love me. Tell me all the rules you’ll break just to be with me. Tell me you’ll leave your boyfriend just because you can’t live without me.

I know it sounds vain, but your lust is my elixir. I drink it up like the nectar of the gods. I gobble it down like it is the goddess’s ambrosia. Lying in your bed, watching the lazy rain droplets trickle down the windows, I know I’m where I’m meant to be. I don’t want to wake up. I want to stay here with you in this moment.

You say something stupid like, “But he’ll be home this afternoon. He comes back from his business trip today.” You tell me that every Sunday morning, and every 9 a.m., you break my heart by not wanting to spend your life with me.

I tell you how perfect we’d be together. I remind you of the way our bodies fit together like an open and closed parentheses, but sometimes, you close yourself off from me

like I’m a venom

and you haven’t found an antidote yet

like I’m a disease

and no one has bothered to search for a cure.

You stop me from telling you I love you. You stop me from telling you how perfect your curves are and yet, you’re the dream I don’t want to wake up from.

My eyes are gray from crying too much; I swear the color drained out of them, but you say I’m maudlin, you tell me it isn’t poetry I write you, it’s just sad.

You tell me I could find a girl at a coffeehouse or a bookshop. You tell me I could go to a record store. You tell me those hipster girls would love my photography and my poetry.

You tell me I need to leave you alone. You tell me that I need to stop dropping by, unannounced, that your boyfriend noticed my VW Bug down the street a few nights in a row. He mentioned it to you. He said something about the trampled sunflowers on the front porch.

The ones I thought were poetic and sad.

When I put a dead rat in your mailbox, you called the police.

When I started writing poems in blood, you put a restraining order on me.

But love has always been crimson, and my eyes have always been grey, even before all the crying.

Forgive me, my love. I must have crossed a line, but I just wanted to linger in your bed on a Sunday. I just wanted to hear you say that you loved me.

Isabelle Palerma

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 Ghost for all Eternity: a Short Fiction

SEBASTIAN

I drive. I drive in search of you. I drive to forget you. Most of my passengers don’t speak. Silence is both a miracle and a plague. Both holy and evil.

I don’t speak either.

It is what it is.

One morning, I had a passenger who had eyes like you. They were brown swirled with cinnamon. I didn’t believe she was you, but I hoped.

I try. I try to forget you. My heart hurts. When I think about you, it aches. You once told me, “Sebastian, you’re too dramatic”. But now, you’re gone.

And the world is empty.

My sentences are short because I don’t know the language. I know grief is a language all its own – one I am fluent in. You spoke much better than me. I have pain I cannot find words for.

This country was your home. I live in this foreign land, hoping to find you everywhere I look. You are nowhere.

I am nobody in love with a ghost.

Photo via cottonbro studio

I think about your calling me dramatic and picture an actor on a stage. Life is a tragedy with no direction. Grief is a rock in my stomach that weighs more than love ever did. Love was buoyancy and lightness. Levity and joyousness. A balloon. Not a stone.

All of my clocks are stuck on the date I lost you, Annalise, February 10, 2020. It was a Monday.

Lunedí – that’s how you say Monday in my language. It sounds like sadness and eyelashes frozen with tears. But you can’t hear my voice. I wish I knew how to reset my clocks, so they, too, would remain frozen at 6:28, but they press onward.

And I know you would tell me to move on too, but I can’t.

Moving on means forgetting.

I refuse to forget you, Annalise.

You’re in every flower I pick, every passenger I drive to their mundane lives, every song lyric I hear, every tattoo I ink into my skin.

You are everywhere and nowhere all at once.

I guess this is what love means.

My heart belonging to a ghost for all eternity.

Photo via Zarina Khalilova

ANNALISE

Sebastian, Sebastian, I hear you cry my name in the middle of the night when everyone else sleeps. Your tongue lazy with exhaustion, thick with the fumbling of foreign vowels and consonants, the words you have struggled with for six-and-a-half years.

I know you don’t blame me for being gone, but I feel like a ghost, the way my memory haunts you. I watch you toss and turn at night, dear Sebastian. I see how you refuse to take our pictures off the walls. You haven’t yet made peace with my absence, but I am gone now and you have to let me go.

Photo via Marina Utrabo

You still sleep with my pillow and I have heard you say it still smells of my shampoo, but Sebastian, dear Sebastian, the years press on and you must let go.

You look so aimless since I’ve been gone, wandering around this city, your eyes wide as you take everything – and nothing – in all at once. I want to apologize to you over and over, but I’ve done nothing wrong.

I was walking late at night, I’ll admit that. It was dark out, yes, and my coat, too, was black, but Sebastian, I was in a crosswalk, I had the right of way.

I know you’re not from here, my love, but it was a red light, that didn’t mean for that driver to speed up, you’ve driven in the city before, you know that means to slow, to stop. She hurried, thinking she could beat the light; instead, it was my body she beat, merciless, as metal against flesh often is.

Sebastian, dear Sebastian, please just let me go.

end.

Isabelle Palerma

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