Age of Blight Read Free

stomach, a tingling in my nonexistent knees, a weakening as the vacuum in my nonexistent throat closes in. But when the days are long and there is nothing else to do but wait for my long-gone son’s return, I dream up scenarios where I whisper to my boy as he reaches out to me for his daily ration: Come to mama, Harry. Come forth and drink your milk . The wires are waiting, waiting, waiting to prick you with their barbs, love you to hell and damnation with their invigorating pinpricks of pain. I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you until death does us part. And until then and because you need me, Harry, you need me to stay alive, the wounds from my love-embrace will continue to fester, to be reopened, to never ever heal. The blood from the wounds scoured afresh would taint everything you do and everything you are as you go fashioning despair out of steel containers, irradiating and maiming and taking what you don’t own, tying the unwilling ones to your rape rack, reintroducing them into the natural world after torturing them, when all this time you knew, Harry, you knew that they were irreparably damaged. Because nothing ever heals, my boy. Nothing really ever heals.

The Ghost of Laika Encounters a Satellite

    I, Alpha Space Dog and only passenger of Sputnik 2, am trained to keep my head, paws, and tail inside the spacecraft at all times. I am the first animal launched into orbit and the first animal to be deliberately killed in space—or that was the plan at least.
    My real name is Kudryavka, Russian for “little curly,” before they changed it to Laika. I was a stray, and I thought God-Dog had finally beamed Its mercy-paw on me when somebody took me from the streets of Moscow, scrubbed me clean, and fed me the tastiest, juiciest meat I ever had in my life.
    There were three of us at first, three not-so-lonely but starving strays. They made us do a battery of buoyancy exercices, tabletop jogging, spin routines, the whole nine yards. At the end of the training period, it was none other than the chief scientist, Dr. Gazenko, who picked me to board the great rocket. He said I was in tiptop shape. I was also described as quiet, charming, not quarrelsome with the other dogs.
    On November 3, 1957, they put me in the capsule.What was on my mind at the time? The juicy steak, of course. The one they always gave me each time I successfully completed a task. The technician kissed my nose. Another hugged me tightly before strapping me into my harness. That hug should have alerted me to what they had in store for me. Then they locked me inside, and maybe for the first time I felt lonely. I was shot into space.
    There’s no pleasant way to state what happened next, so I’ll just say it. The core sustainer failed to automatically disengage from the payload, and I died by extreme overheating a few hours after launch.
    In 1957, the Soviet PR machine put out all the stops and told people that I was euthanized when the oxygen ran out on day six. I would have loved it had they given me a time-release lethal dose of poison. That meant I could’ve expire painlessly, while they still got their readouts—temperature, radiation levels, etc. That would have been a gentler, friendlier way to die. What really happened eventually came out in 2002: excruciating death by boiling of internal organs, which was, unfortunately for me, not instantaneous.
    Have you seen my collectible stamp? (I had my face on a postage stamp.) I am gazing in the direction of the person who was coaxing me to mug for the camera because I was going to get a steak later. I was looking toward the direction of men. I was looking toward the direction of hope. In one corner, Dr. Gazenko seemed pleased and happy.
    I thought I got the window seat, which was exciting. But when they sealed the hatch, I could notsee anything anymore. There were tiny lights before me. All the lights were strange and red and ominous during