It was on an Easter card my daughter received from her best friend, lovingly drawn and painstakingly hand-colored. There was a round yellow sun and tufts of green grass. There were speckled eggs in a bright blue basket. And there was an Easter bunny, nailed to the cross. I shrugged and pretended to examine the crayoned stigmata more closely.
Kids are such sticklers for historical accuracy.
Because I now wanted to conclude the conversation very badly, I asked my daughter what she thought the artist was trying to convey. I'm glad the bunny has a happy ending. The bunny's dead. When I was a child, we kept more to the orthodoxies. Mass was still said in Latin in those days, a language even deader than the beady-eyed fox fur clipped to my mother's shoulders.