Laika

A short monologue from the perspective of Laika, the first dog to orbit the earth, as she prepares for her space flight.

People are always smiling and saying ‘Oh... her bark is worse than her bite’. But really, how

would they know? If there were to be a situation where I was forced to use my bite, well; I

wouldn’t want to be them. All I will say is that in Moscow, things with the other strays could

get prettty gnarly, and after a while a dog learns how to defend herself. Not that it makes

much difference here. As kidnappers go, they’re the inane kind. Not a single sharp canine

amongst them. How they caught me, I will never know, except for the fact that at the time I

was sniffing around the back of the abattoir, and that does always put me in a distractible

mood.

But still. The other day, one of them pressed his huge, ugly, hairless face against the bars of

the cage (as if I couldn’t see him painfully clearly already) and started making these...

cooing noises? I mean eugh. ‘I will call you Laika’ he said on my first night here. ‘Like a

what?’ I said but he wasn’t listening and just said to himself ‘Like-a dog’. Then his face

screwed up for a long time and he made a weird kind of squeamish, hawking bark and

looked very pleased with himself for some reason. He kept repeating it to himself, ‘like-a

dog’ and then doing the bark again, like a pup that’s found a rotting egg and keeps trotting

back to try and show you.

I figured I’m going to need a hobby when they send me up, so I’ve started writing little

poems in my head, but the morons in lab coats are really disrupting the process. I think

they could have bothered with at least a nod to decoration, maybe a rocket ship or

something. The whole sleek-white thing they’ve gone for is bland as fuck, to be honest, and

not exactly what you might call ‘a conducive environment’. I don’t get why they have to

make everything either white or metallic. I think they think it makes them look like they

know what they’re doing with the whole space thing.

They don’t though- either know, or look like they know. They look like they are fidgeting

around waiting for an appointment.

It’s obvious I’m going to die up there. That has become clear. What I don’t know is how, or

how long it will be before that starts to happen. I mean, what really do they think is going to

happen by putting a mutt like me into space? Even if the whole thing comes off perfectly,

and one dog is sacrificed so future generations of humans can ascend etc etc, its not like

space will be improved by their grubbing, incessant presence all over it. Can you imagine?

For them to be suddenly everywhere, sticking their huge, smooth noses into one of the only

things they haven’t managed to ruin yet? At least in my last glimpse of this universe I will

own myself. God forbid I ever become somebody’s ‘pet’.’