Wire Mesh Mothers by Elizabeth Massie
1
The orphaned cotton bits, blown loose from the butchered fields of December, scattered themselves across the chipped blacktop of the county roads outside the small town of Pippins, Virginia. They danced their ice dance, dodging automobile tires, winding up for the most part dead along the roadsides and wrapped like suicidal ghosts about the bases of splintery mailbox posts. Sometimes kids played in the harvested fields, picking the remnant fiber, stuffing it down the fronts of their shirts to make big boobs like Miss Carole, the Sunday School teacher down at the Riverside Church of Christ of Nazareth, or making light-weight snowmen by rolling the pieces together into big balls and then pinning the pieces together with thistle thorns. It didn't snow much in Pippins, and real snowmen were hard to come by in the winter.
Usually, though, the kids found other places to play because the plant stubble was so thick and so harsh sneakers couldn't keep out the pain. And so the cotton bits were alone to explore their small world on their own, disguising themselves as things they weren't, playing dress-up, playing make-believe.
Looking like snow. Or turkey down.
Or thick white ashes from a distant crematorium.