Maple

Leave me alone with a jug of this syrup and who knows what maple mayhem I’ll get into.

Once someone asked me for my favorite word. I wanted to say “malice” but that sounded too mean, so I gave them “maple.”

It did the trick – totally threw them off the scent of my aggression.

But I honestly do love maple, with its high-pitched sweetness, so piercing only a dog can hear it.

The taste speaks to some darkness deep in my soul where a sleepwalker stands bathed in the light of an open refrigerator, swigging the sticky liquid, like bourbon, straight from the bottle.

“I am drinking the blood,” she chants. “I am drinking the blood of the forest.”



From Out of the Blank (Coffee House Press, 2025). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.