Thursday, July 27, 2006

A Dust Bowl Cotton Tail


They had been on the trail for a fortnight, a clan of three bouncing along in a tired goatcart, when Bunners Cottontail woke to some bad news. There was a lettuce blight that year, 1932, the year of the dreaded Leaf Mite.

The Cottontails had no money. They were moving from the high desert chill of Charleston, South Carolina, to start anew. Bunners Cottontail was a shoe shiner, a lover of soporific flora, and the glitter of Hollywood. She wanted her children to become lagomorphic heroes like Peter, Benjamin, and Easter.

The great rampion patches had been fenced, platted, subdivided, upturned, and were going out to city builders, oil drillers, and sodbusters.

With her yellow bonnet, matching apron, bowlegs and weather-beaten face, Bunners Cottontail was gonna feed the mouths of her young-'uns by hook or by crook. The plan was to get to Oklahoma, where the winters were not as bad as South Carolina, and see if one of the new fancy-pantsers might need a shoe-shiner with a quick mind and nerves of steel.

Word was, a family could always pick decorative kale as well.

1 comment:

Kat said...

Oh my god. My grandmother made me one of these, only mine was a cow. It's still scary.