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…
My writing desk is a mess of sticky notes—story ideas, scenes I want to write for my next writing project, upcoming deadlines. But my favourite sticky notes are bits of wisdom I’ve heard from other writers about writing:
Lately, I’ve been trying to trust my unconscious mind more as I write, and I hope that by having these bits of wisdom on my writing desk, they’ll embed themselves in my mind and unconsciously find their way onto the page.
As it happens, this story was born in response to a prompt for which we were asked to click through a picture generator and write whatever evolved in our unconscious mind. I landed on a photo of an angry face carved into a half-peeled banana, and the story emerged. I didn’t intentionally set out to write about grief, but rather the strange connections our brains make as a way to make sense of our world.
I got so excited by this story that I sent it out too early and, of course, it was rejected. I was trying to do too much. Originally, I had the father’s photos stolen in a burglary, which raised too many questions to tackle in a flash. Fatima’s mother also saw different faces but as I thought about how seeing faces in objects became a placeholder for the mother’s grief—a way to survive her grief—I decided to focus on one face. At some point, writing has to move from the unconscious mind to the conscious hand. While revising I’m always trying to answer the question: What does the reader need to experience the emotional truth of the story?
While revising this piece, I happened to listen to a radio program during which the host was interviewing actors starring in a local play. They talked about how memories of loved ones start to fade after a generation, and two generations are all it takes to forget someone who once lived. I thought about how quickly people are erased from our lives and what’s left in the vacuum that grief creates. What is left for Fatima and her mother? The way we grieve someone is such a personal and intimate act. Grief shifts our axis and forever changes how we move through the world—and I wanted the mother’s grief to go on for decades because so much of grief is about surviving it. Unconsciously, “Pareidolia” was a story about making sense of our world. Consciously, it became a story about how we understand ourselves. I needed both to get this story right. That, and a little patience.
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.
