The dog commited some exceptionally evil acts at the beach, for which I punished her with a bath, for which punishment I must now atone by eating chocolate rabbit ears. This rabbit, five inches tall, wrapped in electric blue foil, pink-eyed and idiotically smiling, with an actual cloth ribbon around its neck, is the last piece of Easter candy in the whole house. This isn’t as impressive a show of restraint as it sounds: my mom only dropped off the candy on Friday because I am, after all, a grown woman. But still — to eat the chocolate Easter bunny is to commit a kind of crime. It looks so perfect, so like a toy. You try to refold the wrapper to disguise the ear-ectomy: look! antennae! but it’s a mess. On the other hand, if I don’t eat it soon those white flakes like a skin disease will show when I finally unwrap it. And then what? Eat it anyway with the avidity of the guilty and self-disgusted, certain I am, in fact, eating some sort of crawling fungus, though a teacher, or maybe just a kid at school, told me it’s nothing to worry about, that’s what happens to chocolate when it melts and rehardens, or throw it out (throw it out? the poor fellow half drowned in a compost of onion skins and coffee grounds?) and see in myself one of those people so afraid of pleasure that they let everything go to ruin?
I’ve unwrapped him. He looks a little feral without his foil. Someone took the trouble to etch a few eyelashes but the smile is gone.
The rabbit is now, for all intents and purposes (read: my digestion), a chipmunk. I left some nubs of ears and made a foil mullet for him — maybe those singing chipmunks have a tough cousin named Mitch? Mitchmunk, sings baritone? — but anyway, he’s over it. He’s actually glaring at me, his blue wrapper stretched tight over his head, his eyelids tugged back. Mitch, I’m sorry. Mitch, I can’t bring them back. Mitch, accept it. You’re one sweet carapace, dude.
