Tapping a Maple

Well I’ll be damned.

Ken Cosgrove got a story published in The Atlantic:

The south side of the tree, Fitz had once explained, gets the most direct light from the sun. The heat, day after day, would warm and soften the sap, making it more pliant, more easily yielding to our desires—as if, I thought with a chuckle, it had availed itself of Secor laxatives. Fitz held the compass in an outstretched arm, eyes narrowed toward the hovering needle. It shook like a Relax-a-cizor. He moved slowly around the narrow perimeter of the tree trunk, circling, slowly, until, with the strength of Right Guard deodorant and the confidence of Richard Nixon—

“Here,” he said.

He had found the spot for the tap. He drilled; he hammered the spile. The trunk shook with each impact. I imagined the sap—soon, the sap—slow and sweet, its trickle as voluptuous as a siren wearing both a red dress and an even redder shade of Belle Jolie lipstick.

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