Relative

Randall Andrews

Relative

That feeling you get
when your not-quite-light-speed ship
finally arrives at a deep-space outpost,

and you disembark thirsty
and hit the bar

and meet a girl who just teleported from Earth,

and she’s a dead ringer for her great-great-grandmother,
who you met the night before shipping out…

and she has your eyes.

_______________

Randall Andrews is an award-winning fiction writer and poet from southern Michigan. His poems have been published in places like Abyss & Apex, Space & Time, Dreams & Nightmares, Star*Line, and Illumen. When not writing, he can be found wearing the soles off a pair of running shoes, listening to his favorite John Williams soundtracks, or hand-feeding his loyal flock of wild songbirds.

Author’s Notes and Backstory: One Friday last spring, I was hiding out at the Toledo Zoo with my notebook and a copy of Andy Weir’s Hail Mary Project. I read a section dealing with the concept of time dilation under the watchful gaze of a mammoth, and it had my wheels turning. Later in the day, I was headed to the local Barnes & Noble when my favorite Michael Jackson song played on the radio. The lyrics “his eyes were like mine” caught my attention. With the additional help of a strong coffee from the bookstore café, those two seemingly disparate ideas merged into a poem.

Editor’s Comments and Image Citations: Yes, coffee shops are great places to create and revise! A bit difficult to image the words, so the Microsoft Designer generated image took some liberties. The input was “a twin paradox–one is a young girl, and the other is her one grandmother on another planet (both with same eyes).”