originally published by Los Angeles Review
My Son’s Father
By Liz Prato
“Give Jimmy a kiss for me,” he says.
“When he wakes up.” I finger the imaginary coils of a yellow phone cord, how it tangles into itself and can only be made straight again by spinning upside down.
“It’s late.” He says this as if I’m the one who called after midnight from a telescope aimed at the Incan sky. It’s only two time zones away, but over four thousand miles south-by-southeast, and another six thousand straight up.
“Jimmy wishes . . . .” My voice gets sucked away. My son is only three and I don’t know if he wishes much. “He wishes he could see you.”
“There’s so much dust in Centaurus A,” he says.
My son’s father: worn motorcycle leather and gravitational math, praline ice-cream on salt-chapped lips, tires grabbing hot asphalt through the sharp twists of the Pacific Coast curves.
