Jump down turn around, pick a bale of hay.
Jump down turn around, pick a bale of cotton.
Jump down turn around, pick a bale of hay.
She sang as she picked the roving apart, but it wasn't soft, safe, wonderful cotton, despite her assumption, despite its appearance.
It was fiberglass.
Carcinogenic, full of slivers that weaseled under the skin, shimmied into the lungs and brain, and set up housekeeping, eager for spouse, children, third cousins twice removed to come along ans expand the compound.
Fiberglass.
That miracle substance so pervasive in the housing industry that it was regarded as the lead paint of the new millennia and no one was sure whether the better approach was to remove the contaminant or contain it in walls and spray foam polyurethane.
Fiberglass in toys and drapes and attic insulation, where she sat, fluffy piles around her. She liked the way it glistened, the hologram effect when she held a piece to her eyes and pulled, until the light coming through the tiny window was a rainbow. It was her favorite game, that fall, hiding in the attic and singing, a pretend princess waiting for prince charming to kiss her into forever-never land.
Years later, when the doctors told her she had ‘white lung', the fiberglass version of asbestosis, she wouldn't remember that fall.
Who remembers the innocent games of childhood, anyway?
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