On this sacred Christian day of Easter, this sin-sodden heathen would like to thank the Easter Bunny that I am old and jaded already and not one of the poor bastards whose tales of snacking in the springtime of their life and of this newly greened year, appear below. The title of each story is assumed to be the name of the child, based on the verbalizations of their enormously buttocked overseers. All scenes occurred in March of 2016, in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.

The three-year-old boy named Yo was wearing new flannel coveralls and had freshly corn-rowed hair. He had stood at the knee of the fifty-year-old rhinoceros-sized hoodrat female quietly, as her order was processed, an order which filled the cart to overflowing. After paying with her food stamps, she set down a bag that weighed about twenty pounds, loaded with choice meat and such that she had demanded be set aside and not “all fucked up wit dis udda shit ‘ear.”

She looked at the boy, who seemed not to have the power of speech and pointed at the bag, “You got it, Yo!”

The boy walked wide-legged up to the bag and tried lifting it, but without much success, as he was a mere few pounds heavier than the sack of meat.

The woman stood with one hand on cart and the other on hip, and looked disdainfully down at the boy, who looked up with fear-widened eyes as she said, “Yo don’t even wan’ ta know what happen’ to niggas who cain’t carry dey weight!”

A tear wet the boy’s eye and he heaved, half-lifting, half-dragging the sack of meat behind his enormous mistress, who drawled on, “Come on, Yo!” as they made their way toilsomely on out the door.

At a Dundalk area pizzeria a huge spandexed woman and two year old boy waddled in side-by-side. The boy saw the soft drink case and said, as he pointed, “Soda!”

The woman, sweating on this first hot day of the year, snarled, “Bitch, yo gots yo wadda out in da car.”

The child then pointed at the snack rack and said, “Ships!” and the woman said, “Bitch, keep yo hands to yoself—Mamma gettin’ her eat on!”

Mamma then turned to pay for her cheesesteak sub with extra mayo and the boy darted at the snack rack, snagged a bag of chips and then began to scamper toward the door. Then shot out a long brown arm, as if King Kong had become a transvestite and had his arm shaved, painted, bejeweled and bangled. The darting child was seized by the shirt and lifted off the ground as he twisted in her grasp by the collar like some naughty kitten and glared up into her eyes and she promised, “Bitch, put dat shit back or I’ll slam you!”

At the word “slam” the boy’s eyes lit up and he dropped the chip package to the floor and was so delivered himself to scamper off as the transaction was completed.

At the snack rack a large woman and three thinnish children, one a boy, selected their individual boxes of snack cakes, just as they had each selected their individual boxes of cereal and of cookies as well. One bag of candy was in the cart for each brood member, with a larger bag owned by the mother.

Once at the register the mini-orders were placed on the belt one child at a time. Likewise, after the order was processed, each child received its bag of groceries, though the boy ogled the large package of lemon-filled sandwich cookies with bad intent, reaching his five-year-old hand out to caress the clear plastic package, only to have it smacked by a giant chocolate paw, and admonished by his matriarch, “Muvafuca, dem’s Mamma’s cookies. Step da fuck off!”

As the Morning Star rises in the east on this Resurrection Day I shall pray to my quietly dying, farseeing, raven-feeding god that reincarnation is but a bad metaphysical joke. Otherwise—based on demographic trends—I may come back as a little chocolate egg, destined to grow into a much-cuffed and oft-cussed welfare check in sneakers at the mercy of some cruel giantess.