No mother should have to handle this.

The father places a hand on the small marble statue and shuts his eyes. “Take me. Take me instead. Please spare my boy. Give him more time,” he prays. But who is he praying to?

Nothing happens at first. So he does what he is told.

The next day he brings sweet red wine. Dessert wine. They can’t afford it; they’re buried under medical bills. What’s one more debt?

Then he brings bread, so fresh that flour films the pads of his fingers as the room takes in the welcome new scent.

Next he offers salt, thick grains from the ocean, a natural force greater than all of them, as great as the universe.

He digs flowers straight from the garden, potting them in rich dark soil.

The sea and the earth. He is offering the world.

His boy keeps breathing, but he doesn’t improve.

The man needs more, a grander sacrifice.

Words whisper inside, wheedling into his brain and implanting themselves deep in gray matter.

You know what to do, they say. You know, you know…

He does. The answer is tattooed on his mind. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Etch, etch, etch. He has been chosen to do this. It is his purpose. It is how he will save his son. He can’t think of anything else. Anyone else.

This is his mission.

He wakes up for work. He eats crisp bacon and eggs scrambled with cheese, then swills a cup of coffee so hot it scorches his tongue. His last meal. It is bitter. He kisses his wife, his lips lingering longer than they have in years. The smell of her, sweet gardenia—somewhere in all of this grief, this torment, they’d forgotten each other. They’d forgotten to be people. He remembers her now in that red gingham dress the day they met, her long honey hair cascading over her shoulder. She smelled of gardenia then.

He says nothing, but somehow she senses. She knows him well, and she doesn’t stop him.

He joins his crew, as he has for twenty years. His tan coveralls are buckled on his broad shoulders. His work boots are laced. His white hard hat is firm on his head, though he needs no protection now.

They were hired to repair the one-hundred-year-old gas lines cutting below Roaring Creek and into the public buildings. The crews are massive, and no one notices when he slips away.

No one notices the fumes.

But he can smell them. Taste them. The power they give him, over life and death. His son’s life. Nothing else matters. Not anyone else, and especially not himself.

He waits on a concrete step, hands folded in his lap, cracked and rough from a life’s hard work. He doesn’t cry, nor does he leave to save himself. He stays. He is the offering, the ultimate sacrifice. This is his choice, his deal with the Angel of Tears—his life in exchange for his son’s. What parent wouldn’t make that trade? The others are merely a bonus—dessert offerings, a little extra sprinkle to sweeten the deal.