Dad is alone among his maples, augering syrup taps which will soon spew sap through spiles to buckets hanging off the trees like supplicating tin gargoyles. He always says Mom boiled him down, the same way he concentrates the sap into syrup and draws sweetness from something watery and thin. He says any good in him came from her like how the light of the sugar moon is just the reflected light of the sun.
None of us kids or the grandkids have time to help him anymore but we all got his sweet tooth: maple cream and maple candy and double helpings of salted maple pie. He goes on alone in the cold early spring and the maples rise around him like the ribs and vaults of a silent cathedral. Arthritic fingers work the tools shakily through mittens which Mom used to knit the snags out of and which are now five years torn.
Parker M. O'Neill's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Crepuscular Magazine, Writehive's Rescuing Curiosity Anthology, and Hungry Shadow Press.
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