Little Bug Satellite (for Laika)

I don’t remember being born. Perhaps that is natural, given my shut eyes and closed ears, but I believe it was more than my fragile youthfulness which prevents a memory from forming. I think I’ve blocked it out. Surely a thing like that is too awful to remember? Leaving the warmth of a body for a brutal Russian cold. And the streets. Miles and miles of icy streets. I couldn’t navigate them myself at first – I would follow my mother around, a desperate pup, a flea in her orbit. A little bug satellite. One orbiting Moscow and a mother, not the Earth, as I am now. A lost dog in orbit of a world too big.

I’m trying to remind myself that I had existence before this one, before this orbit.  I was once in orbit of the city, a moskvichka sputnik. No, no, that doesn’t sound right; the genders don’t agree. Perhaps if I were one of my brothers I wouldn’t be here, in this metal box, this orbit, this space. Space is empty and I am so scared and so small. But that is why I was chosen – the girls are quieter, smaller, more timid.

‘Zhuchka’, they called me. Little bug. I’ve always been a little bug, moth-like and wandering. ‘Idi syuda, limonchik, kudryavka’. Come here, little lemon, little curly. I think I’ve always been this small. Was the world always this big? Suspended above, my eyes yearn for an up-close scent of it, my paws are hungry for solid ground to taste beneath. Memories are too warped to hold onto smallness and as such I fear I will be forgotten.

I hope the other two will soon forget me; Albina, fair one, with the loving eyes in a sea of white, and Mushka, little fly, with the nervous glance and the jittering. Easier that they forget and do not question, than to remember. I would like to save the world some whimpering. They were too scared to be chosen, too loved – I am glad it was me instead.

Lamb child. Isaac. Zhertva shall be my new name. Sacrifice. It is kindness that has them believe I don’t understand the concept, and I love them for it. I resent them also, the two men up there, or else below. Scientists. I think that’s what they’re called. I understand my existence as an offering, but for all else I am lost. Oh Lord, to that human God somewhere far away, would you listen to a poor soul like me, lost in the limbo of dark? I can’t take this drumbeat in my chest, the merciless ticking of a clock in my heart. It’s in my legs and my eyes, the flashing, the cruel machinery. Oh God, oh God I can’t breathe, there’s no more air, no more light. I can’t see the light, can’t picture their faces, man nor dog. Everything is lost. Why would you let such a dark and empty place exist? Why would you send me here, alone and aimless?

Wandering as I am now, so too was I when they found me. I don’t remember that rebirth much either; again, the memory has been suppressed, but I can recall the newness of artificial light, of clinical sterility, and of love too. There were two of them, two men in all their human height and glory, and scientific though they were, so too were they kind. It was a love birthed of pity, but it was there. From the one with the more rounded head, the straight set nose, the sternly smiling mouth and too the pointier one, with kind eyes and more giving smiles. Missing them, I sit still, as they trained me to do. 

The cages we had were restrictive to the extent of paralysis, and they seemed to get smaller every day. Soon such confinement was all I knew. They trained me also for the nausea, the rapid rush of blood in my ears, the dizzying, lonely waking up in the dark that so knocks me out. But it is worse here. I can’t say why, it's just more. It’s not like that awfully human steel structure, in which I didn’t know myself, of round and round till the Earth and my mind collapsed. Somehow, it’s more. 

I am gone up here. Obliterated. But this space and this time is my own so I will try to think of something good. 

He took me home a couple of days before I got here. The sterner looking one. Took me to play with his children, to be petted and fussed over, to be a domestic creature. It was warm in his house, not like the streets, nor like my cage, places of cold, the former blunt and rough, the latter smooth and sharp. It’s warm here too.

This isn’t my place or time, not really. How can it be? I don’t own it, can’t hear it or taste it. I’ve been on borrowed time my entire life, they gave it to me, gave me a place I don’t think anyone’s ever been before, for a soul couldn’t exist in a place so dreadfully lonely. They will take it back soon, this dead place the street dog holds in her jaw, this place I’ve had to pilfer, and I’m glad of it; I’ll be glad of the loss of this time and this space, and instead take my memories, which can be blocked and warped, the little things excluded, the big things enhanced. I’ve blocked my birth for fear of cold. I think I may die from the heat of this thing. 

They said goodbye with a kiss on the snout and some words I’ve cast aside. I love them, and resent them, and miss them above all else.

Little curl, little lemon, little bug – can such things exist in this heat? Sometimes if something is hot enough, you may mistake it for cold and recoil from ice, not flame. The shock of the nerves is all that really matters. And so I fall to the heat; or else the cold.