Mother, You Are the Electric Blower Beneath the Dancing Roadside Fan Puppet of My Nightmares, or “Whatever Happened To…?” – Mark Parsons

March 9, 2026

When you lose a person, you keep that person in your memory. When the memory slips away, there’s a ghost. This is for you, ghost of my mother, Barbara Jo. Barbara Jo.
This is for your ghost, mother, that has become my ghost. The ghost I own, the ghost that owns me.
In the first book of the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon, the eponymous serial killer meets a blind woman who lost her sight from diphtheria when she was a child. The woman recalls visiting a zoo and seeing a tiger before she lost her sight. Not having seen a tiger for many years, she has held onto the memory of that tiger; although by now, she confesses, it probably looks like a cross between an ant-eater and a donkey. So it is with you, Barbara Jo. I’ve known only your memory for so long, trying in vain to hold onto you; who, what, or that you even were…I can no longer recall.
But that doesn’t matter. Not here, not now. This is my dedication. For you, mother I’ve lost, in exchange for your ghost. For your ghost, that haunts me, torments me, that visits me in my despair, my loneliness, my rage.
A dust devil winds across flat arid high desert topography, a palpitation on the blanched strata of horizon roiling with heat shimmer like the bottom of a clear stream. Confusion and fury draws a bead on the wanderer in the desert.
Your ghost, Barbara Jo, cold little girl from the mining country of West Virginia, who lost her father to infidelity with jailbait not much older than you were: forever after, cold and distant, imperious and unfeeling.
In The Long Goodbye, the private investigator and twentieth century knight errant, Phillip Marlowe, stumbles on a dope ring in L.A. He’s kidnapped and imprisoned in a drying-out clinic where he’s drugged. Occasionally he comes out of his stupor during the night and witnesses a bright, multi-colored phantasm that hovers in the corner of his room. Terrified and stoned, he attacks the apparition. Attempting to bludgeon it, his clenched fists slice through warm moist air. He tries to grab the lurid specter, but his fingers clutch only wet palms, fingernails digging into his own flesh. Later he discovers the phantasm was achieved by a gas line that pumps benzodiazepine into the room; a vaporizer billowing damp air from a vent along the floorboard; and gel movie lights projected onto the moist vapors.
When I was young, Bette Middler belted out a number one song that praised someone who inspired her, “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”
There is no wind, in this cheap rented room with putty walls, but the overly efficient air conditioning. I have no wings to speak of, and the burning sensation that curdles and pricks my scalp with gooseflesh is from no golden halo. But you, mother…your ghost…is like the fan beneath the roadside dancing fan-puppet of my moebius strip-nightmare highway, an endless loop of two-lane blacktop always returning to where I began.
Your ghost, mother, an electric fan that fills with air the billowing residue of my father’s thumb and forefinger, a blow-up dancing claw, what was left of my father’s hand after the surgery. Rising thirty feet into the clear blue November desert sky, the orange sepia-tinted nylon a crude attempt to capture the nicotine stain from his unfiltered Camels. The dancing inflatable probably started out as a crustacean claw to advertise a seafood restaurant. I imagine it turgid with helium, criss-crossed with ropes woven in and out of brass grommets spaced along thick reinforced seams, led by men and women in knit caps and safety vests over hooded sweatshirts, as it floats down a highrise canyon in New York City, part of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
In the distance, behind the surging fan puppet claw, the dark jagged ridge of the Rincon mountains, brown and bare, riven with black creases. Here and there a peak is dusted with white like powdered sugar on a crust of fried bread. Slowing down in front of a restaurant, the tires roll over gravel that has been spilled on the highway by vehicles pulling in and out of the parking lot until I can hear each individual crunch of gravel, like the last kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn. Visible beneath the crudely painted features of my father’s hand—the freckled complexion and fine blond hairs common to gingers—pentimento traces reveal the blow-up’s former life as a crab claw: the pimply texture and bumpy teeth along the inner curve of each digit, as well as the clear line between the starkly painted white and orange parts of boiled shell.
The parking lot is wide and empty and the pale gravel looks deep enough to jump in and do the backstroke. The restaurant is a one-story building with tinted windows along the dark front and double glass doors in the middle of the facade. I’m not hungry, but I squint and try to see any trace of light inside. I grimly wonder if the place serves land crab. Satisfied for reasons I can’t understand, I press down the accelerator. The engine roars and strains. It’s a 1974 Plymouth with a blown 225 straight six engine and a four-barrel carburetor. Settling in at 85 mph, the car seems to float, threatens to trip over its own momentum. Too much torque for its own good. The car requires a light touch. I look in the rearview mirror. I lean and crane my neck. The dancing fan claw from my childhood creases, lists over the two-lane, then straightens as if jolted awake from light, unwelcome sleep.
In popular culture the proverbial ghost wears a white sheet to give it physical form. Your ghost, mother, wears the grotesque sock-puppet of my father’s hand, the sin of the father reduced to an orange pinch, caricature of a damaged soul’s instrument of evil. It remains in my mind, a child’s bedtime wind-up nightmare pinching monster tapping a restless rhythm. The cold dead pincer my father’s cancer left to me…become the malignant hand puppet that pinches the boy awake, or chases him screaming high-pitched, equal parts terrified and excited, through the house. Sleep will be impossible for the boy. You, mother, sigh.
The tweezer-pinch of my father’s hand as detailed as an ivory carving from pre-revolution China, thumb and forefinger meet like fine, toothy tips of needle nose pliers. A pincer and grip, the stump of my father’s claw is cold and lifeless, like a knife handle carved from antler, but it grows warm in my hand. The ginger hairs on the back of the thumb and dorsal side, above the lone finger, tickle my palm. Turning it over and twisting it around: the thickened, squarish orange nails are long and blunt like blades of little coal shovels; along the lateral side, where the doctors cut away the fingers and most of the hand, the blistered, globular contours of hypertrophic scarring like a giant wad of chewed bubblegum; herringbone creases where the skin closed.
The hand is my fetish, my sacred object. I wonder if I could shrink it and bronze it and wear it around my neck. I squeeze the warm bulb of textured flesh. The nails of finger and thumb come together. The teardrop-shaped opening between index finger and thumb narrows, comes to life with creases like a squinting eye. A clear wet rivulet runs out of the squeezed-shut corner of the eye and traces the curve over the back of my thumb, leaving a wet shiny trail. Drips, falls. I should preserve it encased in acrylic.
I could use it like a pair of tongs, to pick something up. Or I could pump the fleshy bulb of stump like vintage pruning shears, the kind made from a continuous piece of looping metal, and cut out shapes from construction paper. Or tin snips, to hew a silhouette scratched on burnished sheet metal, the outline frizzy where the awl slid and veered on the slick metal, and the mechanic began to trace again. Maybe I’ll find it half-hidden in a bed of lettuce on a platter in a seafood restaurant, sunk deep in Peter Pan crescents of rippling green leaf. The lettuce is wet and cold. The ruffles of each piece of lettuce so full and buoyant and springy it’s difficult to see the entree. I see the ivory-colored shell of some kind of crustacean. The shell is textured with random grooves and lines. I run my fingers over the warm slightly greasy surface and something like skin comes off. I remove the skin without even really trying. Breaking off pieces of shell, I stick the pieces between my lips and suck bits of flesh and grease into my mouth. From a small crevice I suck out goo that could be some kind of bile or organ of the mysterious creature. Finished, I lick my fingers clean and energetically begin to rifle the lettuce, collecting the bits of exoskeleton and shell. The bits are slippery in my fingers. Like a movie would-be hero assassin-hitman who practices assembling his weapon blindfolded, my hands move with a speed and knowledge of the artifact that is beyond me. Before I know it, I’ve assembled them into the pincer shape of my father’s hand. I hold it up and stick the ivory-carved thumb in my mouth. The nail blade is sharp on the roof off my mouth, and scrapes my tongue as I remove the thumb. There is skin and hair. I repeat this with the forefinger. The sharp, squarish fingernail against the roof of my mouth, the cool hard detailed ivory texture. Removing it, the skin is soft and warm. And hairs. Then again with the knob-like palm and shaft—hypertrophic scarring like chewed bubblegum and herringbone creases under my tongue. My teeth scrape the hard surface. Removing the handle, the skin and blond hairs. I hold the instrument and look it at. It’s dry, no trace of saliva. Warm, living.
The nightmare that chases me from rest, from ease, from any contentment or belief in the future, the hand-puppet devil of my father’s pincer thumb and forefinger, clamped on my soft parts like alligator clips or vise clamps, this is for you, your ghost, and the demonic form it wears, haunting and mocking and tormenting me, burrowing into me at any moment of doubt, hesitation, loneliness, fear. What armor, God, can protect from me this thing inside, this evil artifact for which I am the reliquary, that is the inescapable truth of my soul?
This is for my cunt mother, and all the people she told her own son didn’t bother to write, or phone, or visit, inform her of his whereabouts, or tell her anything at all. She says this after she had used him for her own gratification in the most warped and ghastly ways imaginable, and then realized that he’d been permanently, irreversibly damaged. Having used up her own son, and realizing that he will never be of use to her, or anyone else, she disowns him, disavows him, and tells everyone who will listen that she doesn’t know what happened to him, that he just quit having anything to do with her, poor woman, but no, she doesn’t hold it against him. This woman is practically a saint, they say. No, she implores people, do not hold his cruel and callous behavior against him. She just wishes and hopes the best for him. As his tender-hearted, sentimental mother, this is all she can think about. What’s best for him. Even now. Even after all he has done to her and the rest of the family.
She doesn’t mention how she gave him up to her husband and their eldest, a daughter, sadistic monsters who harbored so much ill will toward the woman, if not outright hatred, if not blood-lust, that they chose to exact the worst revenge imaginable. They decided to destroy what she loved most. They would injure, humiliate, violate, defile, and debase her only son, whom she loved too well. Loved incestuously, erotically, using her sex to control him, hold him there, keep him in the crux of the family’s massive dysfunction, the lynchpin of a house of mad face cards ready to collapse. Loved in the all-consuming way of a woman driven by primal need, offering access to her body to control him. Until finally she found it arousing: the more violently he was abused, the more sexually gratifying she found it. The ancient sexual instinct in the female goes into survival mode: watching the adult male attempt to kill her son, she goes into heat.
This is for all the people who have betrayed, double-crossed, and abandoned a person, but only after they’d used him up until there was nothing left they wanted or needed or could use, threw the poor, stupid, used-up son of a bitch in the gutter with all the other trash—and then had the temerity to tell anyone who bothered to ask, no, why no, I haven’t heard from him since forever, by gosh, and no, I don’t know what happened to that fella, and you know, some people are just like that. Whatever happened to…?
Well, I’ll tell you. I’ll fucking tell you what happened to me and where I am, you cunt-whore. I’ll fucking tell you, and you can tell all your sympathy-dripping friends. What happened to me. Where I am. In the words of that monied St. Louis Jew, Fred Seidel, in his poem “White Tiger”: “[Resting] in fierce peace on that far shore.” You remember where I am, and what I am. I’m dead-to-you. And I’d better stay dead-to-you, for your sake. And for the sake of everyone and everything you care about. I’m your ghost, now.