You’ll Be a Star
by Katherine Garrison
I plop down next to Tricia on the floral-patterned beanbag.
“My workplace has an infestation of elephants,” I say.
She nods, watching the static of the television. “It rained worms at mine last week.”
“They’ve hired six new janitors to clean up the poop. Anything interesting on?” I join her in watching the static.
“You see that singular pink dot, Corrie?”
I lean in closer. “Yeah.”
“It’s staging a revolt and threatening to take over the whole transmission.”
“I bet the folks at the station won’t like that.”
We continue to watch the screen and slowly but surely, a tide of pink overcomes the usual black and white.
“Well, that was interesting, but I’ve got to go pick up my monkey suit from the dry cleaners. I have a party to work tonight.”
The suit isn’t ready when I get there, so I head over to the bar to drink a pint of draught maple syrup, asking them to hold the pancakes. It leaves me buzzing and hungry for french fries, but I don’t have the time, and I’ll need an empty stomach for all the bananas I eat tonight. My suit’s ready when I walk back into the dry cleaners. I pay with tickets to come watch me perform in my monkey suit. They seem pleased. I guess it’s becoming The Event.
In the warehouse I zip myself into the suit and instantly become other, stepping into a sparkly pink pair of gogo boots.
Yolanda accidentally trips me outside my dressing room, and I’m about to lose my cool, but she hands me my first banana of the night, which calms me down. I munch on it as the crowd watches Roger prance around barking the ABCs in his pink poodle suit.
After he exits right, the crowd pulls out their phones and chants for me. Cheers erupt when I waltz out, and I throw the banana peel into the crowd. They return the favor with an onslaught of uneaten bananas they’ve brought with them. I strut around the stage, collecting them, peeling one by one, and eating them. The crowd falls silent, watching me through their phones while I work my way through the piles, discarding the bright yellow peels back into the crowd. Fifty in, I’m glowing from their radiation. The crowd ooo’s and ahh’s as the lights dim and I trace pictures in the air with my glowing chimp fingers.
I shy away and hiss as a woman throws a loaf of banana bread on stage. The crowd joins me in my rejection, and the bouncers remove her from the premises. When I’ve eaten one hundred bananas, I float up to the ceiling and exit through a window. I can hear the crowd go wild as I smoke a herring on the roof and float back to my apartment.
“How’d the show go?” Tricia asks while we lick our fingers, sticky with cinnamon roll frosting the next morning.
I smile, my teeth still glowing faintly. “The crowd loved me.”
“Of course they did. Want to go watch Venus and Mars do the salsa through Pleiades the other night?”
“I thought they were doing the tango.”
“They changed the program about—” she taps her temple and checks her ring watch, “five minutes ago.”
“Alright, I’ll dig out the telescopes from the infinite closet.”
I skip to my room and fall asleep until six p.m. the previous day. The stars that night outdo themselves, weaving intricate labyrinth-like patterns into a navy sky.
Katherine Garrison is a private chef and baker originally from the mountains of Wyoming, now living in rainy rural Wales. She writes short fiction, cnf, and poetry often exploring themes through nature, food, the weird, or some mix of these. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Elegant Literature, Baubles from Bones, Superlative Literary Journal, Variety Pack, WordFire Press, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, HAD, Small Wonders, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and others. She was nominated for Best Microfiction 2026. When not cooking or writing she loves going on long hikes with her partner and their dog, camping, birdwatching, foraging, gardening and being outside in genera
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “You’ll Be a Star”? I have a soft spot for leaning into surreal and weird elements in a lot of my fiction writing and this story originated in a fun little free write with my wonderful writing group. As a poet, I’m always on the hunt for interesting images and lines to collect for future use and the beginning of this story, specifically the elephant bit, was inspired by a surreal poem I wrote over a decade ago. Once I had the initial image the rest just flowed as a stream of consciousness type of process with each weird element riffing off the next. Sometimes an idea just won’t let you go!
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