Jesus behind BARS.

Halfway between the Franciscan Fathers and St. Augustine's Roman Catholic Church, Jesus is locked behind bars, his nose literally rubbing against rusty cylinders fencing a front yard. But everyone long ago stopped trying to set him free, believing this is just one more cross for their Savior to bear. Everyone except Aida Estella Damico, an old woman who gets off the bus one day and spots the life-size statue on her way back from buying two chickens at a live poultry market.

Normally Aida Estella doesn't travel by bus. Normally she doesn't walk outside her own Italian neighborhood, let alone ride public transportation to another one, but for Easter she must cook live chickens and prepare a feast like she's never prepared before. She is accustomed to making a ham with pineapple slices and candied sweet potatoes--after a dish of ravioli, of course--but this year she will prepare meat as white as the Easter lily in memory of her husband, who died last year three days after the Resurrection.

More than any other Easter, she will celebrate the miracle of rebirth. She hasn't prepared live chickens in years, yet she persuades herself that she must start with life because that's the only way she can acknowledge death and the wonder of rebirth.

On the bus, she pulls out her pocket Bible and rereads the passage where Jesus rises from the dead. She thinks of him moving that boulder and breaking out of the cave and figures it might as well have been a prison with bars and barbed wire. She closes the Bible and pictures two roasted chickens in the center of her dining room table with enough food to feed her son and two daughters and their families.

She stares out the window, knowing nothing about this neighborhood except that there are as many Cubans here as there are Italians in her neighborhood. She's heard them called "boat people," which reminds her of how she was stowed in the basement of a steamship for 18 days. There was only enough room to stand like a candle with her arms pressed against her sides. She remembers the smell of vomit and disease mixed with the smell of salt water.

As miserable as that was, she is convinced that the fear of falling off a raft and drowning in the middle of the ocean like so many Cubans have done is worse. These Cubans, she's seen on the news, make their own boats from inner tubes and scraps of canvas and wood.

And why do they risk their lives? The only answer that comes to Aida Estella's mind is faith. They believe, like she believed, that when one life ends in the old country, a new one begins in America. The hesitation she and her husband had walking up the plank and waving goodbye to their Italia is no different from the hesitation the Cubans had stepping into a boat.

And neither, in Aida Estella's mind, is different from her husband's reluctance to let go after being in a coma for weeks. She knows that next to leaving her family, the hardest thing she's ever done was to release her husband. He gritted his teeth. His arms were stiff and his hands were in fists. She forced one open like it was a flower bud that needs an ant to pull back its petals.

She told him it was time. His body was nothing more than a cage that trapped his spirit. It served no purpose anymore other than to hold him back. He should be set free. Go to yet another new world. Walk up the plank and have faith. She could never muster the courage to tell him that until Easter Sunday. Three days later, he died.

All of this reassures her doubts of being on a bus en route to a place with nothing more than her broken English. She must begin with live chickens and go to the only place her butcher says she will find them.

Aida Estella gets off the bus in search of the live poultry market. Her back hunches over. Her feet turn out when she walks, but as she breathes through her mouth, she funnels enough air to keep two people alive. With an apron tied tightly around her waist, she walks slowly up and down the aisle of Jorge's Polleria, sneezing from the feathers everywhere--embroidering the red tile floors, nesting in empty egg cartons, floating in the air like tattered kites. There's even a feather slowly landing on Jorge's shoulder as if it were a snowflake about to melt on concrete.

The chickens are caged on either side. In between dangles a round, metal scale on which they are weighed as a needle fans from left to right and right to left.

Aida Estella stops to watch the birds dip their heads into a long tray with bits of kernels. She is taken by the hens and how their thin red plumes flutter the way ruffles do when they move. More than the clucking, she hears the rattling sound of the birds' thick claws scraping against the metal cages. She points to the two she will buy and cook for her Easter feast: a pair with beaks poking through the cage, searching for something other than feed.

The owner, Jorge Gutierrez, suggests she pay first, not because he is eager to take her money but because he knows she won't be able to reach inside her pocketbook once she has a chicken in each hand, two loose chickens that have been penned up for so long.

"If you could pay now, please," Jorge says.

She opens the clasp on her change purse and hands him a roll of bills with a gum band wrapped around it. He slips the wad in his pocket, releases the hatch on the cage and plucks out her two chickens.

"I fix?" she asks. Jorge explains how to clean and dress the chickens. Aida Estella may not understand all his words, but she watches every hand movement Jorge makes.

"I fix," she says when he finishes the demonstration.

Aida Estella clutches the birds under her armpits as she walks toward the bus stop, taking small steps so her stride doesn't give the chickens the momentum to escape, to slip through the rings of her arms like circus hoops. Soon the chickens come to feel the strength of her grip and restrict movement to their necks. Another block and they tuck their feet under their bodies and settle into the warmth of her bosom. For the time being, they are stone in her hands.

Once she relaxes her hold on the chickens, Aida Estella looks straight ahead. It is then she spots a life-size statue of a man leaning up against an iron gate. His hands reach out through the spears as if he is begging for a handout. She sees he is wearing a cloak the color of eggplant and a crown of thorns. A red dot is centered on the palms of his cupped hands. He wears his heart on his robe.

She stops and looks in horror into his almond-shaped eyes peering through the bars. This statue of Jesus reminds Aida Estella of her husband in a coma--the stiff arms and the palms of his hands facing up, the eyes staring into space. She puts her hands on her head and screams to set him free, "Fallo andare!"

The chickens hit concrete. Aida Estella runs after them, but as slow as they are, she is slower. The birds flap themselves to the hood of a pickup truck, their feathers floating in the air above her head.

Across the street, she spots a vendor wheeling a hot dog stand with a huge gold and blue umbrella. With one eye on her chickens, she hurries over to the woman. A magnet of Christ on the cross, surrounded by bright red and yellow ketchup and mustard bottles, is sticking to the shiny counter. A drop of ketchup is splattered on the cross. Aida Estella taps the woman on the shoulder and asks for help.

"Un momentino. Aiutami."

The woman nods and keeps wheeling her cart, the stem of the umbrella wiggling back and forth despite the duct tape wrapped around it.

"Chiami la polizia. Subito. Subito." Aida Estella says as quickly as the woman bolts across the street.

The vendor is Cuban and doesn't understand Italian, but she's lived in the neighborhood long enough to know what the fuss is about.

"I know. I know. Que lastima. What a shame," she says, picking up a bag of buns that slid off the counter. She parks herself outside the post office for the lunchtime crowd.

"Le mie galline. My chickens!" Aida Estella yells. She stops in the middle of the street and wipes her brow with a handkerchief, waving it when a passenger van approaches. She notices a holy card clipped on his visor. A rosary is wrapped around the rearview mirror, although she isn't sure what the pink fuzzy dice are doing there.

The driver pulls to the side of the road beside the parked truck with the chickens. He gets out and follows Aida Estella, then stops because she is going in two different directions--toward Jesus behind bars in the distance and back toward her chickens now up on the roof of the truck. She grabs the driver's arm, but he shakes his head and mumbles something in Spanish about her not knowing if she is coming or going. She asks him to call the police right away. To set Jesus free and to catch her chickens.

A van passenger beeps the horn then occupies the driver's seat, releasing the emergency break so the van drifts toward the driver and Aida Estella, who still won't let go of his arm. The van passes the driver. He breaks her hold and runs after it. It stops. He crawls in and drives quickly through the red light.

Three boys walk toward Aida Estella, who is now standing on the sidewalk between Jesus and her chickens. Their T-shirts are loose, their pants are baggy, and their athletic socks sag below their ankles. They take turns kicking with toothpick legs an old battery box as if it were a soccer ball. Thank God, she thinks, they are wearing holy medals around their necks, yet the medals are next to World Cup buttons pinned on their shirts. She accidentally kicks the battery box when she asks them if they speak Italian. The box hits the parked truck, scaring the chickens into flight once again.

"Brazil is numero uno," one boy says.

"Free." She points to Jesus behind bars.

"Say what?" one boy says.

"No, free my chickens." She points to her chickens.

"Make up your mind, lady," another boy says.

The boys sprint after the chickens, which are now on top of a garbage heap. They each take turns trying to scale the dumpster. Aida Estella watches with her hands pressed against her cheeks. One boy hooks his foot over the top of the dumpster, and she breaks into a cheer as he thrusts his whole body up.

"Numero uno," she says, thrashing her pocketbook like a pom-pom.

The boy grabs the leg of a chair on the heap to help him stand up, but he tumbles backward and lands in his friends' arms below. They shrug their shoulders and run off.

Aida Estella grabs a board from the dumpster and begins poking at the chickens, but to her surprise they fly to a limb of a nearby tree. She walks up to the house where Jesus is behind bars and knocks on the door. First with her knuckles, then with her fists, rapping again and again, but nobody answers.

She walks over to Jesus and tries to stand him upright so his face isn't against the bars. Although the statue is hollow, it's too awkward for her to move. She leans against a parking meter, waiting for someone who lives in the house to come home. Or for someone to climb the tree and snatch those chickens. Every so often she shakes the tree, thinking the chickens will fall into her arms.

Aida Estella corners the next person she sees walking down the street, a Hasidic Jew. He says he can do nothing for Jesus, but he goes home to get a ladder to rescue her chickens. When he returns, the chickens have elevated themselves to a rung on a telephone pole.

"That's high up," he says unfolding his ladder. He climbs the six steps on the ladder and stretches his arms only to find he is an arm's length too short.

"Le mie galline," Aida Estella calls out.

"We need a bigger ladder," he answers.

The chickens are now perched on a rooftop. She kicks the ladder once the man's feet touch the earth then helps tuck in his shirt before walking over to the statue of Jesus. The Hasid watches as she shakes the lock, thinking it will miraculously unhitch itself.

"That's where your chickens should be," he says, folding up his ladder and walking home. She wipes the dust inside both of the statue's cupped palms with her apron.

Glancing at the statue's feet cramped against the bars, Aida Estella curls her own inside her shoes until a shadow swallows Jesus into darkness, the same darkness that surrounded her husband's body when he died.

And now Aida Estella pats the earth with her feet as she walks away from the hollow statue to feast on the sight of her two chickens, a bounty of golden wings rising up into the arms of the setting sun.

PAOLA CORSO is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.