Dead Man’s Son
By
Katherine Tomlinson
Peter hadn't much minded growing up without a father. His mother and
grandmother doted on him and his mother's brother, Uncle Henry, was a huge
presence in his life, teaching him how to pee standing up, and throw a curve
ball and drive a stick shift car, which was way cooler than just being able to
drive. Uncle Henry loved him, Peter knew, but sometimes he said things to him
that Peter wished he hadn't, like when he told Peter his father was a piece of
shit who would have ended up in prison if he hadn't been killed when he was.
"I'm sorry to say that Pete," Uncle Henry had said,
"because you're a really good kid. But you've got bad genes."
Peter had thought his uncle was talking about blue jeans and that hadn't
made any sense to him at all.
It had been Uncle Henry who'd told Peter how the doctor had extracted
sperm from his dead dad and saved it for his mother and how three months after
his father was cremated, she'd been injected with the sperm and he'd been
conceived. Peter could have lived the rest of his life without knowing that.
But the information did explain a couple of things.
Like how it was that Peter could hear dead people talking whenever he wanted
to. And sometimes, even when he didn't.
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