by Mark Parsons
I wanted to go as Rosa Parks for Halloween this year to protest something or other, but it’s wrong to wear black-face—shoe polish, burnt cork, or grease paint, even iodine’s off the table. Of course, if I just throw on a bonnet or knitted beret, maybe a pill-box fascinator, with a housecoat or bathrobe over a sweater, that doesn’t quite get the point across. So I went down to the local retailer, a big place with a high, dropped-ceiling, florescent lights, and aisles wide enough for the forklifts to deposit pallets of merchandise wrapped in layers of cling wrap stretched tight and silvery and blurred with color from whatever’s inside, pallets as big as the blocks the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. But when do they do that? Not when customers are here, that’s for sure. I mean, it’s open 24 / 7, to say nothing of holidays. Any reasonable person avoids this place like the plague on holidays—secular, religious, cultural, it’s always nightmare, like a zombie movie, except not with the old-timey shuffling zombies, but the modern, bath-salts-crazed zombies like you see on video footage, going from near comatose sitting in the lotus position in the corner of a parking garage in the middle of the night, buck naked, to a full sprint at some poor security guard on grainy closed-circuit TV. I think the government just likes holidays to get people spending money. I mean, shopping on holidays! This place has got everything: tall metal cages full of big rubber balls in neon colors smeared with glitter to give them a lustrous sheen, aisles and aisles of every kind of shampoo, but just the kind for people, the shampoo for pets must be somewhere else. Still, shampoo for dry brittle hair, oily hair, to give stringy hair more body, to make hair with too much body manageable, for hair damaged by too much washing, too many perms, too many colorings, medicated for dandruff, or head-lice, and a range of scents that would put an ice cream parlor to shame. They’ve also got cheap home furnishings, like TV stands with cabinets to put your game system or whatever in, media consoles made of imitation wood that’s just strips of particle board hot-glued together and covered with PVC vinyl laminate film so it looks like oak or cherry or teak. I used to have one and during a drunken birthday bash it got broken, so I had to throw it away. However, the thickest panels weren’t particle board, I guess because that would make the console too heavy for most people to carry home and assemble and move around. No, the thickest panels were hollow. Well, not hollow, exactly. The really thick panels were filled with a long, continuous strip of cardboard, like you’d unwind off a spool, the strip winding around on its edge, in some kind of crazy maze of accordion crimping. When the panel broke open as my friend and neighbor Bill stomped his foot down, it looked exactly like the inside of a wasp nest, the way wasp nests have those layers of thin paper the wasps make from their spit. Anyway, I finally locate the Halloween costumes. There’s Rosa Parks costumes, of course, because as a society we’ve made progress, and everybody knows representation matters. But none in my size, which doesn’t surprise me at all, to be honest. How many guys 6 foot tall and built like a traffic barrel want to dress up like Rosa Parks for Halloween? Still, representation matters, and it’s important for white people like me to promote black people in history, especially at Halloween. Dejected, I’m walking back through the store and hear the beep-beep-beep of a forklift in reverse. It occurs to me that I was in such an emotional state, what with my sympathetic nervous system in overdrive, when I rushed here that I didn’t even stop to think what time it was. I look down at my wrist-watch to see the delicate, gleaming steel bars indicate the hour: just before dawn starts to push the cobalt fabric of night up the edge of the eastern horizon, the sky of a new day like the blade of a bulldozer ripping and gathering the luxurious textile firmament upholstered with stars like twinkly heads of thumbtacks you use for DIY projects—not the tacks with clear plastic heads and crimped edges, and helical points you screw in, but the burnished brass ones with domes like little mushrooms. I hear the sound of cheap carpet being ripped up of a piece, the coarse stapled-down fibre coming up, pop-pop-pop, like the tires of my car rolling slowly over individual bits of gravel that have come unstock from the asphalt in the parking lot, or the last kernels of popcorn in the microwave. Just then I happen to glance at a mask I can use for my costume: it’s black and made of rubber. The skin’s deeply grooved and furrowed, textured like a peach pit, and that’s a bit of problem, as are the browridges, which are heavy and prominent. Also, the mouth is spheroid: the upper jaw canopies forward, and the lower presents extreme underbite. Not to mention the weaponized teeth. The head is covered with thick synthetic hair that makes a little point at the top of the cone-like skull, but if I’m wearing a hat, like a pillbox with a fascinator, it won’t matter. I must’ve walked through this place a thousand times and seen it, and each time I wondered, “Why would anyone need a gorilla mask in the middle of June?” Just goes to show, you never know when something will jump out at you at the precise moment you need it.
Mark Parsons’ books include, Stills (Southernmost Books in 2023), Lake Tahoe is an Elegy (chapbook, Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Spiral (Anxiety Press, 2025), and The Kingdom of Middle of Children (Southernmost Books, 2025). https://x.com/