Grandfather
by Jack Powers
He could be my body double. My twin. There’s a word for it but I can’t remember. He had a scar under one eye, fewer freckles on his hands and a ridiculous mustache, but otherwise he was my spitting image. Yet he didn’t seem to notice, making some inane comment about the color of the eggs in the ship’s cafeteria platter.
“Oh, that’s just the recycled feces,” I joked, mostly to get a better look at him.
He turned to me and squinted to see if I was serious. He had the same green flecks in his blue eyes, but not a flicker of surprise.
“And see that lemonade?” I asked and shook my head. “Not lemonade.”
He laughed at that, but still no head tilt, no hesitation, no sign he noticed anything. Was I losing it? Was it the accident? He scratched his chin like me. Squinted like me. Hunched a little to disguise his height. It was annoying to be honest. But he just paid for breakfast and went to a table of fellow interns by the starship’s window without a glance backward. I know my head hadn’t been right since the fall. Was I hallucinating?
“Webster,” I said to the Zardonian behind me, “do you think that new guy looks like me?”
He strained his neck, watched my double sit and dig into the gruel. “Yeah, I can see it.” Webster’s eyes shifted like he was holding something back.
“What?” I asked.
“Except younger,” he said with a shrug.
I leaned in for the eye scan, winked at the 20% tip option, stepped out of the line and said, “Younger? Huh.”
When he showed up in the lab, I realized we must have met before, but huge swaths of memory kept disappearing since the fall. They usually returned in pieces. I’d probably pop awake in the middle of the night and recall meeting him. His nametag said “Intern” and a smudged name I couldn’t make out. He followed me down the rows as I checked the health of the plantlets. He asked about the new graftings and the type of tape used–checking everything against his notes. He was a go-getter. I’ll give him that.
“I think I just need another day or two,” he said.
Another day or two? I hoped I’d remember his name before he left. Why didn’t I just ask? See if he noticed our similarities? To tell you the truth, I didn’t want anyone to know how damaged I still felt from the fall. Everything in the lab had come back. My centuries-old knowledge of splicing plants, adapting new breeds to meet the needs of the ship’s medical staff, all the wisdom handed down from generations of grandfathers was intact. But some mornings it took me ten minutes to figure out how to put a shirt on. The lights burned my eyes when I woke up, so I kept the them off and wore sunglasses in the lab. I’d stood in the dark shower this morning, moving the razor from hand to hand for five minutes trying to recall what it was. They allow three months for accident recovery before termination and I was on month four.
“Nature knows better than scientists sometimes,” I said, wondering if I’d already told him that. “Grafting comes up with things gene-splicing scientists can’t anticipate.” My grandfather’d said the same thing to me word for word and I suddenly remembered a dream that had awakened me in the middle of the night. My grandfather held the roots of a malus pumila in his gnarled hands. “No two specimens are exactly alike,” he said, his voice gravelly. It must have been near the end. The whites of his eyes had that yellow coating old people get. “You know I’m not really your grandfather.”
I shook my head to clear the scene.
“Are you okay, sir?” my body double asked.
Was it doppelganger? No, something shorter.
I stuck my hand in the manure bucket and massaged a clump into the base of each propagule as we passed. “This manure is human waste,” I glanced out of the corner of my eye to see if he was grossed out. “Treated, of course.” He wasn’t fazed–even reached in the bucket and mixed some into another sprout’s soil.
“It’s the key,” he said, before I could say it. I must have said it to him before. How many times?
“How’d you get the scar?” I asked, pointing under his eye and hoping I hadn’t already asked.
“Oh!” he laughed. “Originally, there were six of us, before it got winnowed down to me.” He rubbed the scar absently. “Sometimes we’d fight.”
I pictured a little room on some distant dormitory ship with bunk beds and identical dressers. Six interns wrestling on the floor. Was I imagining or remembering? I needed to heal fast or my secret would come out.
He helped me clean the tools. As we washed our hands he watched and closely replicated everything. He even hummed, “Happy Birthday” as I sang it twice under my breath.
Back in my pitch-black room, I almost face-planted into the bunk. I felt more exhausted every day. But I dragged myself into the dark shower, remembered what the razor was for and shaved, scrubbed off all the pathogens from the lab. My mind emptied as I stood in the dark letting the hot water almost scald me.
When I got out, I knocked the sunglasses off the sink and had to turn on the light to find them. When I stood and looked in the mirror, I almost fell again. The face in the mirror was my grandfather’s! Wrinkled. Spotted with age. Half-closed rheumy eyes.
And I remembered everything. Memories rushed back so fast I clutched the sink to stay upright. I heard my gravelly voice as if it was someone else’s say, “Another day or two? Oh, God!” and I remembered the word.
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Jack Powers is the author of two poetry collections: Everybody’s Vaguely Familiar (2018) and Still Love (2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, Salamander, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. He won the 2015 and 2012 Connecticut River Review Poetry Contests and was a finalist for the 2013 and 2014 Rattle Poetry Prizes. His flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Inkwell, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Point Science and elsewhere.