![]() Eventually my mind left my body and soared into the sky, a reverse dive into a sea of stars. I hobbled away, whimpering, and hid under the stairs. Dirty, squirmy pain exploded across my abdomen. He shot out of his chair and stomped upon me. This was a mistake his contempt exploded into disgust. My father, who had been stroking a pair of old baby shoes, looked at me with contempt so deep it scorched my heart. Then she turned around, and in her bruised sockets I saw my grandfather’s eyes: flat, glittering yellow. I was very young then – perhaps three – and the sight of her familiar form standing before the fire sent me into such transports of joy that I bawled from sheer ecstasy. Once, he even wore the body of my mother. Grandfather preferred the bodies of men, but sometimes chose women or children. ![]() Or the way his eyes – hard, round yellow eyes – glinted deep within their stolen sockets. I will never forget the sight of him – of many hims – in different bodies as flesh degraded and fell away in wet, discolored strings. So it entered other bodies, like a hand inside a puppet, and wore them until they rotted away. He was not a spirit he had a corporeal body of his own, a twisted, monstrous thing covered in scars and hard, glittering skin, a body that could shrink to the size of a garden snake or expand to the size of a house.īut for all its marvels, this body was weak sunlight burnt its eyes and blistered its flesh. Using a variant of blood magic perfected by my forebears across many centuries, he leapt from body to body. By the time I turned nine, he had gone through six bodies. So instead, I will describe my grandfather. How can I describe this in a way you will believe? Maybe I can’t. Monsters like my father and my grandfather. You see, in the deepest, most forgotten parts of the world, there are things that most people cannot believe and even fewer would understand. Given enough time, anyone can learn a language.Īs a child, I was afraid of everything. As I said, it eventually becomes a language. I know what it was like to be punished for transgressions I cannot remember or understand, to be hurt so badly my heart rate triples and my mind flies out the window and soars into the stars, retracing Laika’s doomed flight while my husk squirms and weeps on the floor of a dirty house sixty-eight miles below.Įven so, I adapted to punishment. Perhaps I’d think this was my punishment. What must it be like to not understand why – after being plucked from cruel streets and dropped into a bustling world of kindness – I was now alone? Perhaps I would think I’d been a bad dog. What must it be like to not understand what I was seeing, or why it was suddenly so loud and so hot? How would it feel, spending my last hours hurtling through divine darkness in a metal bucket? I spent many hours imagining her terror, pain, and loneliness. ![]() She perished the same way she’d lived: lesser, beneath, inferior. Mere hours after launch, Laika died an agonizing death. Shortly after reaching orbit, the interior of Sputnik 2 became catastrophically hot – far too hot for mammals to tolerate. This made Laika’s mission a death sentence. #LAIKA DOG DEAD BODY HOW TO#The Soviets knew how to put a rocket into space, but they didn’t know how to bring it back. She was the very first animal to orbit Earth. On 3 November 1957, the Soviet Union put her on Sputnik 2 and launched her into space. You see, Laika was a stray dog from Moscow. My father meant to humiliate and degrade me with such a name, but he honored me instead. He used the name to remind me of my place in the hierarchy: lesser. To Father, Laika was synonymous with dog. My father named me Laika because when I was born, my grandfather told him to treat me like a bad dog. ![]()
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