"Deadbeat Dad"

He was a shadow then, a promise spoken in the stale air of a rented room. Now, he's a name, a ghost on a faded photograph, a question mark etched in the lines around my mother's eyes. He left, a vapor trail across the state line, a tire screech swallowed by the highways hungry mouth. I build him from fragments, a stuffed animal that's a monkey, a half sung blues riff, the scent of cheap cologne that clings to old letters. Yeah right, what old letters? He's a story I tell myself, a villain, a hero a stranger. Most likely the stranger. I see his face in the cracked mirror, a faint echo in the set of my jaw, the tilt of my head. We are strangers woven from the same thread, a broken tapestry stretched across years and miles'. He is the absence that defines me, the empty space I fill with what ifs and maybes. A hollow sound where a father's voice should be.