Slightly autobiographical!

Alex was a funny kid, the kind that parents dread without realizing it. What they want is a quiet kid who does what he’s told. A kid who’ll show enough interest in books to do well in school and find himself a decent job afterwards, marry a respectable girl they’ll approve of. The kind of kid that’s polite to his elders and his teachers.

Alex was close to being that kid. He was always polite, called you sir unless you happened to be female, and he was indeed very interested in books.

Hell, Alex loved books, to the point where his favorite was a four book series called the A-to-Z Encyclopedia. He loved the pictures in it and he loved the words and how they always had something to say about everything.

Then there were books on space, though not rockets themselves. Rockets were old things people used in ancient history; shuttles were new and cooler. And satellites! Alex loved the thought of all those satellites orbiting the earth, and he often looked at the stars, hoping he would spot one.

He knew all the planets of the solar system and could sort them by name, distance from the sun, size and color (Alex really liked pictures of planets, especially Saturn, with its ring which Alex knew from his encyclopedia was made from chunks of ice). He was also amazed by heroic stories of astronauts who walked on the moon and lived in orbiting stations and had to eat and sleep with no gravity at all.

*

One night, Alex was lying in bed, reading about the beginning of spaceflight by the small glow of his flashlight, which he kept so that he could read past his bedtime. The story was about a little girl-dog called Laika that was shot into space to see if it would harm her. Alex thought this was a very brave thing of her to do, since she could have died up there.

It seemed to him that if not for the bravery of Laika, nobody would have ever dared go into space, because…well, because people were afraid a lot in the old times (a fact he’d also picked up in his encyclopedia) and they needed a dog to show them that space was a great place to go.

So, the next day, Alex asked his mom, who was watching the TV at the time, a show about people who had tears in their eyes a lot and then kissed which bored Alex out of his mind, whether they gave Laika a medal after she returned to Earth in her capsule.

“Huh? They didn’t bring Laika back down, Alex,” his mom replied and switched her attention back to the TV. He was quite puzzled by this, because he’d been sure Laika must have wanted to come back home, like that whale Willie did in that movie. So he asked his mom what happened to Laika.

“Laika died in orbit,” said his mother, “because they didn’t bring her down.”

*

Alex couldn’t sleep that night at all, and he had nightmares for the rest of the week. He couldn’t even look at the stars at night anymore, because now he had an terrible image stuck in his head; not the sleek, golden and silver shaped forms of Russian and American satellites spinning past each other and beeping, but a horrible and silent view of a body of a dog, rotating silently around the earth in cold and empty space.

(all crouched up small as if sleeping next to a mother, trying to nudge up to her for warmth even though she wasn’t really there, dead eyes behind half-closed lids and a thin trail of blood floating out of her mouth in the land of no gravity)

Because nobody bothered to bring her down, because she’d served her use, she could be abandoned, because she had no value anymore, and that was enough to let a puppy die in the heartless gaze of uncaring stars. It was, in Alex’s eyes, the ultimate wrong anyone could commit.