Pareidolia by Kelly Pedro
Kelly Pedro’s “Pareidolia” is one of three winners of the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Meg Pokrass.
This winning story drew me in immediately with “My mother sees my father’s face everywhere,” and it kept me on the edge of my seat. Images of a father’s face accumulate like an infestation of loss in this story of a mother’s grief and the effect it has on her adult child who is unable to walk away. I loved the occasional flecks of dark humor and found myself mesmerized by the loss-infused voice of the narrator as I read on. Throughout the story there is a quiet layering of emotion that is nearly imperceptible yet deeply felt. It is told with control, attentiveness, and vulnerability—at once dreamlike and frighteningly realistic. I admire how the author paints an intimate picture of the impossible world both characters have inhabited since the father’s death, and how the story is haunted by the ever-changing face of a dead father whose presence is felt in every word. —Meg Pokrass
My mother sees my father’s face everywhere. Last week it was in our neighbour’s wilting asters. Then, an angry version in a banana she decided to save.
“Maybe it’ll brown into the Virgin Mary, and we can sell it on eBay like that ten-year-old cheese sandwich,” I said.
A week later it was still on the counter, a swarm of fruit flies clouding the kitchen. I mixed apple cider and dish soap into a jar, stretched plastic wrap over top and poked holes to make a trap. A few hours later, Mom called me into the kitchen.
“Do you see it?” She was almost hyperventilating with excitement, pointing to where a clump of fruit flies was floating in a liquid grave. I hesitated.
“It looks like your father.”
My father died when I was five so I really wouldn’t know. A year after his death we lost all his photos in a fire. After that, my mother started seeing his face everywhere.
“Pareidolia,” my therapist, Dr. Underwood, said the first time I told her. “A survival instinct. Happens to women most often.”
I nodded. “Is it treatable?”
“I can’t diagnose your mother, Fatima. I’ve never met her.”
“But if you met her, you could?”
“Do you think that’s why you still live at home?”
Dr. Underwood is concerned that, at thirty-eight, I haven’t moved out. That my life revolves around going to work, making dinner for my mother, doing the crossword with her, and then letting her tell me about all of the versions of my father’s face that she’s seen in objects that day. Yesterday it was in the branches of an ash tree in our front yard that had yet to bloom. Sometimes she’ll lead me through this rebuilt version of our old house, touching each wall and recounting the photo of my father that would have hung there: a shadow of me and my father at dusk, his arms holding me high above his head. Another of my mother and father holding hands in front of the CN Tower on their first full day as Canadian citizens. She reminds me how his eyes were closed in that one.
I’ve come close to moving out. For the past three months I’ve been paying rent on a small studio that I’ve never lived in but fell in love with because when I stood at the sink and tilted my head I could see the slight shimmer of Lake Ontario from the window. Two months ago, Dr. Underwood and I agreed that today would be the deadline to tell my mother that I was finally leaving.
But I haven’t.
“What are you afraid is going to happen?” Dr. Underwood asks.
We do this a lot, break down my fears to show me the things I’m afraid of are unlikely to actually happen.
“I don’t know. What if she keeps seeing his face in food and stops eating?” I can’t share the other scenarios: What if she becomes a hermit, content to live among my old T-shirts with grape stains she thinks are shaped into my father’s face? What if I move out and never see my father’s face at all? What if every memory of him is just a blank space?
Dr. Underwood looks at me, waiting. “You agreed to this deadline,” she says.
“I haven’t missed it, I still have time.”
When I get home I find my mother sitting on the couch, caressing a shrunken avocado.
“Look,” she says, “it’s your father.”
I stare at the leathery skin of the avocado with ridges that look like dry riverbeds. And somewhere in there I see him, finally, sitting cross-legged while showing me how to knot my shoelaces, his fingers taking mine, bending and pulling the looped cotton tight.
KELLY PEDRO is a Portuguese-Canadian writer from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 2024, she was a recipient of the SmokeLong Fellowship for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared in PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Cleaver, Archetype Literary, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, 100 word story, Ghost Parachute, and Moon City Review, and was shortlisted for Room’s 2022 Fiction Contest. She lives on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbek, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Find her on Instagram @kelly_pedro.
Featured image by Tim Mossholder, courtesy of Unsplash.
