Pareidolia
By Hannah Wyatt
“Don’t cut it like that. You need to use the paring knife, and you need to insert it first, like this, then draw it through.”
My sister punctuates her movements, from her slender arm and elbow to the tip of her index finger, set taught over the dull end of the knife. She is cutting fudge and setting the squares to the side, which she will later arrange on a colored paper plate, then wrap with plastic before deciding who among our relatives is deserving of the treat this year.
“So,” I say back, with other things on my mind, “when’s the last time you looked in dad’s office?”
Frankie stills her cutting motions and turns her head - only her head - like an owl to peer at me behind her. Somehow, after 25 years of being her sister, this action is enough to translate into words in my mind. What’s it to you? Or perhaps, a simple fuck off.
I get up to pace around the kitchen and scowl at the things on the walls. Giant fork sculpture, 80s rooster clock, impeccably pasted wallpaper with an ivied design that blurs at the seams. This patchwork room. This mess of a domestic cave. I used to stare into the leaves looking for faces until I dizzied, chewing on the scarred end of my pinkie finger while mom stirred the pasta.
“Why don’t we ever take some of this shit down?” I ask my sister, who has now resigned to sit and stare motionless at the cubes of sugar-butter. “Or at least have some fun chucking it into a dumpster.”
Frankie slips a strand of hair behind her ear and drops her forehead to her arms, folded neatly on the kitchen table.
“Come on,” I plead, “it could be cathartic. Or so I hear. We could bond.” Or something to that effect.
*
“You’re not paying attention. Look.” In 2002, my father begrudgingly took me out to the birch stump behind our house and tried to teach me how to chop wood. Go pound salt, he used to say, when my presence became obsolete. Or when the occasion called for it, shut up. I’d watch his ballerina-esque movements as he drew the ax over his head, the upside-down V of his arms, joined at the wrist. I’d imagine my own self wielding such a powerful thing as I rested my chin in my hand, my elbow on my thigh. Then I’d get distracted by a spider crawling across me, fail to watch the moment of impact between the blade and the log. The violent kiss that made one thing into two.
It wasn’t his fault, really. I was contentious in that way that little girls weren’t yet expected to be at the turn of the millennium. Paris and Nicole hadn’t yet scoured the country for a modest living. Britney was still in that wait, how old is she? school-girl phase that would eventually be frowned upon by Generation Z, to which I would inevitably realize I was also a part of, by a hair. This is just to say, I was a mouthy thing, able to tie the laces of my light-up shoes and ask why mom always lacked a certain amount of hair on one side of her head, all in one breath. With more ideas in my mind than my father could have anticipated.
*
When Frankie and I found ourselves dicing candy in our empty childhood home, which we had become joint caretakers of, we were on the cusp of something revelatory. We just couldn’t see it yet.
She had recently escaped a messy divorce with the man who also happened to be the boy who escorted her to high school prom. It was an age-old story - he wanted children to mold and resent, and she did not. That was one thing we always seemed to have in common, an absolute astonishment at the idea that other people wanted to be parents.
And fresh off the divorce train, Frankie was annoyingly exploring the world of dating apps for the first time at 29 years old. I had watched a few times as she flicked her finger from side to side, assessing whether or not it was worth it to meet up with some guy in our hometown at the local cafe, like a prized pig on display for all the townies to watch.
It had been five years since our parents had died one after the other, as if they were just two pieces in a row of dominoes at the behest of gravity. First, dad had choked on a shred of pork roast. As mom administered the Heimlich, right here in this very spot atop the cool kitchen floor tiles, dad took his last breath. Seconds later, she had an aneurysm, likely staring at those melted faces in the leafy wallpaper as she stopped. And they both slumped to the floor in what could only be described as some sort of macabre renaissance painting, limbs frozen outwards like rays of the sun, bodies close.
*
My father swung the ax again and again. Whoosh, and crack. We were determined to be braced for the cold of that winter, which saw two consecutive blizzards and one state of emergency. I poked at the garden spider traversing my kneecap, then poked my belly button. Then the spider again.
I still can’t explain why I placed my hand where I did that day. Maybe I felt something otherworldly in the falling flurries of snow. I was a curious child. But at some point, my hand ended up on the stump, fingers splayed in different directions while I looked up eagerly at my father, whose back was turned as he sussed out the sound of wind behind him. It was almost like an experiment to me. Would he notice, in the last seconds when he looked forward again, and throw the ax out of the way? Would I find pleasure in the split second I had to pull my hand back? Or would he never turn around at all, creating a third possible outcome that would change the way I saw things for a while.
As it turned out, it was more of a cross between the first two. I admit, there was something thrilling about being responsible for my own hand, my five-year-old hand that moved like jello through the world. While he tried to pull the ax away, and I tried to pull my hand towards my heart, the rusted blade clipped the edge of my pinkie finger. And what was at first one thing became two.
*
“I hate our family!” Frankie grunts as she slams our mother’s porcelain teapot against the cement garage floor. Her big brown eyes dart over to me in astonishment, tucked behind a pair of work goggles. It sounds ordinary on her tongue, although she still seems to be waiting for me to mirror. I indulge.
“Niceee,” I coo. It’s the third item we destroy from the kitchen. Although she’s my older sister, I’ve always felt that she expected massive things from me. A neatly prepared opinion regarding her life. A look of approval when it came to the people she befriended, the cats she adopted, and even the contempt she had for our shared childhood. But really, I want to have no opinions, to carry no weight in re my sister. Often, I roll out of bed in a dark room and hope for fewer conversations with friends, less time spent moving my face in a way that reasserts my life. I despise the pressure of befriending my own kin. Sometimes, I simply don’t know how.
“Good one,” I affirm, a good girl, and I take my turn chucking the rooster clock against the wall, its gears and springs raining down like manna.
*
After the piece of my pinkie got chopped off, Frankie sucked the blood off my finger and wrapped it tight with gauze. She had been the one to hear my shrill cry from the edge of the woods before running outside to retrieve me. Mom was in bed, tending her own wounds. Burnt wrist, scalp pain. A bruise the size of a grapefruit on her upper thigh.
Once I was bandaged, I demanded to have my chunk of flesh back. I was sour about the whole affair, too preoccupied to realize that my father had done the terrible thing then just walked away. Go pound salt, I remember thinking, a feeling of pride sweeping over my body. Frankie and I dug through the chips of wood around the stump, looking for my pinkie piece. Eventually, we came across a little bloodied thing, kind of like rubber. You don’t realize how rare and impressive your body is until you see a little piece of it, detached, by itself against the backdrop of everything else in the world.
“I want to keep it,” I beamed.
“You’re disgusting.”
“Love you,” I whispered.
“Don’t tell mom.”
I looked down at my prized thing with confused joy. I had survived something real and tangible. It wouldn’t be the last time.
*
“I have an idea,” Frankie says, using her foot to push around the shards of glass and plastic on the garage floor. She runs back into the house, returning moments later with a family heirloom in her hands. She looks crazed, fingers curled around the white crackled surface, the cornflower blue designs so dainty they seem from another land. For the first time in a long time, I have pure admiration for the whole of her - top to bottom - this person who sort of raised me in unconventional ways. The one who sucked the blood out of my hand like a vampiric EMT and changed ice packs on our mother’s forehead while I peered around the doorframe like a koala. The one who carefully stuck a pin atop our father’s desk chair as daylight dimmed early in December and I waited patiently beneath the covers for her to return.
She’s the one, the bigger piece of me that will somehow, rare, have a record of the past that aligns with mine, like two fingerprints layered against one another for a match.
And she’s holding the urn with both of our parents’ ashes inside. Both of them. What’s left of their earthly forms intertwined as if Walt Whitman wrote this second act of their life himself. Two people who distinctly hated each other yet danced around each other in a weird harmony for most of their adult lives. Eventually to die together, and be cremated together. To be stirred up together as powder in the same pot.
“Geez, Frankie. I don’t know.”
“Are you kidding me?” she retorts. She really wants to do this. I want to let her. I realize I have no say in who she is and she has no say in who I am. It’s my job to merely witness and acknowledge, as we both breathe heavy in this cement room, to say yes, I see that, I see you.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I decide.
And as the tiny pieces of our mother and father blow across the floor, amidst the mess we’ve made, we mourn and laugh. We press our oily fingers into the ash and act like we are digging to find something in there. We go weak in the knees. Good thing we are already sitting down. I think I can see a face in the dust. My sister points to the spot where I am already looking, and we sigh. Wait a bit longer before grabbing the broom.
THE END
Author Bio: Hannah Wyatt is a West Virginia writer with a particular interest in fiction, poetry, and genre-blurring pieces. Her creative writing and book reviews have appeared in Cheat River Review and Drizzle Review.