The world is flat

Lachlan Marnoch, 2018

“The world is flat. God made it that way.”

Granddad says this all the time, even after we go to the beach and watch ships disappear hull-first over the horizon. So we buy tickets to space.

Out the window the skyline bends as we blast towards heaven. The engines stop, dropping us in freefall. We plummet toward the Earth and miss. Oceans and continents turn below, embedded in the grand oblate spheroid of the blue planet. There goes Mexico. Ninety minutes later it slides by again.

The pilot burns at perigee, stretching the ellipse of our orbit like a rubber band. Granddad watches the Earth recede until our entire human existence sits snug in the viewport. He looks back at that glistening globe, and says:

“It still looks flat to me.”