Pareidolia, In Toast
Jacqueline Parker
Months after my mother’s death, years after cancer began the long, slow mastication of her body, she’s resurrected in my toast. Golden brown and singed, she appears without warning as I’m about bite the border of her crusty skull.
I stare at the carbohydrate portrait like a Magic Eye photo, eyes crossed, the blurred tip of my nose lining up perfectly with hers. She always said breakfast was the most important meal of the day, even if hers was mostly black coffee and cigarettes.
Death is only a construct, she’d say. You can never truly be gone.
My mother wasn’t a particularly religious woman, but she did believe in cosmic intervention. She also believed in Virginia Slim 100s, double dirty martinis, and Robert Redford, and would throw me out of a moving vehicle if the Sundance Kid himself asked her to.
She was a woman designed to move. It wasn’t that she couldn’t hold down a job or she always chose poorly in romance, she just preferred to swerve, slide, and pivot her way across the world, even if that meant teaching me long division in a Denny’s diner over omelets and fries on our way to see the Virgin Mary.
There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people crammed into the parking lot of the bank to see the Holy Mother under the hot Florida sun. In the glass window, arcs of colors swirled like oil stains, forming her shoulders and hair, the gentle curve of a smile. I didn’t see it—her, that is—though everyone else seemed to. Tourists and reporters, believers and non-believers. Chubby pink children and dusty old women clutching rosaries and bibles.
The building itself had become an altar. Fresh tithes came from all sides. Frames of Jesus showed his life in stages, from baby boy wonder to cross-bound man, the latter ones always illustrating various states of agony. Cut flowers, teddy bears, tears, murmurs of private hopes.
Prayers undulated in waves and one minute my mother was beside me, and then next I was pulled to the fleshy stomach of a woman clutching a crucifix to her chest. She rocked and swayed us to the front where we kneeled at the curb next to a bright collection of saint candles. Her hand was damp on my shoulder and she smelled of sweat and laundry detergent. I couldn’t understand her Spanish, but it sounded beautiful just the same.
My mother eventually found me lulled into a trance watching the flame of St. Jude dance from a votive. When I looked up, the crowd had thinned and it was just me and her and the Virgin glittering in the setting sun.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
The sky was a riot of tangerines, bruises and hibiscus flowers, and the bank’s windows caught the sun at just the right angle to make everything look aflame. I still didn’t see her, but I nodded anyway.
“Miraculous.”
“Where’d you go?”
“To find a miracle of my own, baby.”
“Did you?”
She shrugged. “Guess we’ll see.”
“You know, we’re really close to the beach…” I let the word whisp away like sea foam.
She squashed her cigarette in an incense bowl and swiped some dollars that had been tucked into a picture frame.
“What? She’d want us to have it.”
The Virgin Mary’s cash bought us the hotdogs and chips we ate in the sand. When we finished, we threw off our shoes and waded in the dark, shimmering water watching the moon rise over the Gulf. We slept on the beach and counted constellations in the Milky Way while listening to the hush and shush of the waves.
I woke to my mother contemplating the horizon, puffing on a cigarette, her eyes narrow like she was trying to find a ship in the distance.
“Was thinking we might stay for a while,” she said.
“On the beach?”
“You like?”
I did. I understood now why the Virgin Mary came here, with its palm trees and white sand. “What about…?” I was going to say “home,” but we didn’t really have one. We had only been in Viriginia for three weeks before leaving on our pilgrimage.
“Home is wherever you are. You’re here, ain’t you?”
I nodded.
She tousled my hair and handed me the last of the chips she had saved from the night before. “Sometimes you gotta go where the wind takes you and it blew us here to see the good lady Mary and the goddamn gulf.”
Our plan to stay in Florida lasted a year before the breeze took us to Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, and the Oregon shores, where I finally found a place I wanted to hunker down long enough to call home.
To her credit, she tried to make a go of staying put, but it never took. She wasn’t made to choose bedroom sets and toasters or remember that homes needed toilet brushes and dish soap—she was made to move, even if that meant without me.
I tracked her migration by postcards. Some new from souvenir shops in tourist-trap towns, others worn at the edges like she found them under a seat cushion. Over the years, I amassed hundreds of her colorful notes, links forming a bridge across the miles between us.
She never did come back to Oregon; she kept following apparitions of her own making, finding the holy mother of sinners, saints, and sunsets in cigarette boxes and western omelets at truckstop greasy spoons. Knowing her predilection for the otherworldly, I should’ve known she’d come back to haunt me eventually, although who’d suspect using toast for the last word. And, had the Virgin appeared to her in a piece of Wonder bread, well, my mother would have slathered her with butter and jam, and savored every divine crumb.
Jacqueline Parker’s work has been featured in Prime Number Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, After Dinner Conversation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Prime Number Short Fiction Award (’21) and Women on Writing’s Flash Fiction Award (’23). Find her at jacqueline-parker.com
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