Lisa Thornton
Pears, Parmesan, Pareidolia
The man at the grocery places a pear on top of the soup at the bottom of her paper bag. He doesn’t have to do that. Not all of them do. Some of them pack willy-nilly, the produce brown and squished by the time she gets home.
Have a nice day, Madam, the man says. It’s a courtly word-madam. He has a magician’s face.
The troll in the fence scowls when she walks by with bags balanced on her hips. Where the gutter meets the corner of her building-a vampire. Children’s cheeks in the canopy of trees. Carpenters and minotaurs in the clouds.
She thinks there is a name for seeing live things in not live things but doesn’t remember what it is. When she was young, she and her sister held clipboards on bus rides uptown as their father sat across the aisle staring out the window. They let a pencil fall along the paper, the lead dragging down the page as they bumped and jostled until there was a jagged cliff from top to bottom and then they filled in the eyeballs and noses and mouths and chins of all the faces they found in between.
Of course, there are deeper meanings everywhere. Not just faces. The night custodian leaving the light on in the office shows her co-worker whose desk is directly under that light that he is in love with her and only her. And just last week, she got two fortune cookies with her Chinese food because obviously they know something she doesn’t. Either she has a ghost in her apartment, or a new friendship is on the horizon.
She waits to shop for food until Thursdays, when she knows the man with the magician’s face will be working. She eats peanut butter on crackers and sardines from the can on Wednesdays when the cabinets are otherwise empty.
Have a nice day, Madam, the man says, pushing her bags toward her gently. She blushes.
She keeps all the bags partly because they are gifts from the man who loves her and partly because you never know when you are going to need a good sturdy bag but also because the stack of them behind the kitchen table creates a collection of everchanging shadows and when she glances at them from the next room in the evening while watching TV she sees goblins, matronly women from Jane Austen novels wearing bedcaps to spare their hair and once even the Jolly Green Giant from the old canned vegetable commercials.
She used to ask do you see what I see? Like that old Christmas song. Because everyone could do this. If they wanted to. If they let themselves. There were famous examples of people seeing Jesus in toast and the Mona Lisa in crinkled wallpaper. The man, of course, in the moon. But the answer became more and more no so she stopped asking.
Their father is long gone. Her sister doesn’t see the faces anymore. She sees only half of life now. Trees in trees. Paint on walls. Once, her sister even swept aside a young Indonesian boy made of dirt with her foot as they watched old men play chess in the park.
Today, she will let the man at the grocery know his feelings are requited. The troll glares. The vampire hovers. A new face, like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from that show when she was a teenager winks at her from the accordion style hinges on the bus.
The bell on the front door of the grocery jingles. The man looks up. His hands rest on the counter like flowers a few days past their prime, petals softly wilting. She blushes and grabs a basket, gathers soup and pears, bananas and wheat bread. One block of cheddar.
His rose petal hands stack the soup on the bottom. Today he double bags. She feels it two times too, warmth rising in her chest.
Have a nice day, Madam. His voice tickles the skin on her arms. She smiles, aiming the sunbeams from her face directly at his. He catches them and slides them into the secret pocket in the lining of his jacket.
Lisa Thornton
Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW Journal, Pithead Chapel and other literary magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. She won the WestWord Prize in the flash fiction category in 2023. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology and can be found on Twitter/X @thorntonforreal. She lives south of Chicago with her husband and son