Read an Excerpt
The Protester Has Been Released
stories and a novella
By Janet Sarbanes C&R Press
Copyright © 2016 Janet Sarbanes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936196-65-4
CHAPTER 1
Laika Hears the Music of the Spheres
It's over now, the terrible heat. The terrible heat and the horrible noise have passed. I can hear my heart beating, fast then not so fast. Soon He will come to let me out. This is my favorite time, when all is still and quiet, and He is coming.
I have to sit like this a lot, sometimes they make me sit for days, but I like to sit. I listen to my breath moving in and out, and forget that I'm hungry, or hot, or thirsty; that I can't stand or turn around. I forget about Him even, my longing for Him, though it was He who taught me how to find this peace.
But something's different today. Though my heart has calmed, I feel strange. Strange and light. Even though I can't move, trapped as I am between two pillows in my suit — still, I'm rising. If I weren't so firmly tethered, I might float away. Everything else is the same as always, but this is different.
* * *
Something's wrong. He hasn't come to let me out. I search my memory for clues. I think it was yesterday morning, or perhaps the day before, that He took down the Leash and opened the Cage. "Walk? Walk?" He asked, in that simple way of His.
"Yes, of course!" I responded happily. "Shall we go somewhere special, like the Beach?" But He ignored my question, or perhaps He simply didn't understand. After all this time, I know so many of His words and He knows so few of mine.
We did go to the Beach, down to the Great Water, but He wouldn't let me go in, only stand at the edge and smell the salt. There were many gorgeous smells on the Beach that day, even some dead things, but He wouldn't let me near them. "Sit, Laika," He said, and I sat.
He stroked my head with His heavy hand, looking out at the Great Water. I was happy, as I always am sitting next to Him. No matter what I have to endure, when He comes to let me out again, I'm happy.
He tried to tell me something, but they weren't the words I know. They were the words they use when talking across their desks or walking down the corridors. The only one I recognized was "Limonchik," the name no other calls me. Limonchik, He kept saying over and over, putting that word up against the other ones, as if it could somehow make them mean something to me, or make me mean something to those words. Whatever He was saying, it caused warm water to stream from his eyes and His body to jerk and tremble.
"Oh come on, it can't be that bad," I said to Him. He laughed and took hold of the paw I had proffered, but the water continued to leak from His eyes.
* * *
Something's definitely wrong. I know this from the floating feeling I have, and the fact that He does not come. I'm ravenous, too; usually they don't let me get this hungry. And the thirst, I sit and try to forget the thirst.
* * *
There's a horrible creature in here with me. She's only just made herself known. She bites me constantly and says terrible things.
"Ouch!" I yelp. "How did you get in here?"
"I'm a flea. We get in everywhere."
"But they wash me once a week. With a special shampoo."
"Oh yes. They treat you so nice."
"Because I'm not a dirty parasite. Ouch! Stop biting me!"
"I can't," she says. "I'm a dirty parasite."
* * *
The Flea is very angry to be stuck in here with me. I think she bites me more than she has to. "We'll be out soon," I tell her, despite my doubts. "He's going to come."
But the Flea will have none of it. And she has a peculiar explanation for what I'm feeling. She says we are, in fact, floating. "And where we're floating, no one has ever floated before."
"Nonsense! This a Test. I've been through loads of them."
"And what did you think they were testing for?"
I ponder her question long and hard, even though she's biting me.
"They were testing my loyalty," I say finally.
"Your loyalty? Your loyalty to whom?"
"To Him."
"To Him? They don't need to test your loyalty to Him. You're a dog."
* * *
But she's wrong, this flea. I wasn't always so loyal. When they first caught me and brought me in off the streets, I wouldn't let them near. I bit one of them, hard. When he screamed, I bared my bloody fangs and laughed. I paced my cage, I gnawed at the bars, I plotted my escape. I cursed them — long, elaborate curses, and though they understood nothing, my enmity chilled them. "Volchishka," they called me, Little Wolf, and tried to win me over with meaty bones. But I knew that the key to freedom is to live for something other than food.
They were ready to turn me out: ungrateful little bitch, unlovable, untouchable, untrainable, and I was more than ready to go. But then one day He came, in a white coat just like the rest of them, though on him it seemed less a hygienic precaution than the outer manifestation of an inner purity.
"Limonchik," he chuckled when he saw my sour face. Little Lemon. "She's just what we want — a fighter." He offered me nothing but a simple command: "Sit, Laika."
And I sat.
* * *
I think the Flea is right. I've been peering through my window at a deep dark night. The window's small and round, but large enough to tell: it never ends.
* * *
The Flea has been feeding me more of her peculiar ideas. I'm on a mission, apparently, but my mission has nothing to do with the one who calls me Limonchik, or only so much as He is one of them, the men who've sent me into the deep dark night that never ends. They want to go there too someday, and they need to know if they will survive the trip.
"But why would they want to go where their survival is threatened?" I ask.
"Because they feel trapped."
"Trapped? By what?"
"By their tiny planet, which is no more than a plaything in the hands of the Universe, a bright blue ball. They want to know if there are other worlds out there — other planets they could live on."
"And are there other worlds?"
"That's what they must find out, before the Americans do."
* * *
The Americans are another band of men shooting small animals into the deep dark night. Whoever finds the other worlds first, the Flea tells me, will blow up Earth and move on.
"But why?"
"Because they can. Don't you know enough of Man to know that what I say is true?"
"Not my Man," I answer silently, for what does a flea know of higher motives? Not Him.
* * *
I think I'm starting to understand this mission. Not the race with the Americans, that seems childish to me, but the desire to know what's out there. What I've glimpsed through my porthole is so impossibly beautiful — there are no words to describe it. I think He must have been the one who put in the window. He was the one who wanted me to see.
* * *
I'm dizzy with hunger. In all my years of privation, there was only one other time I remember feeling like this: it was the dead of winter and there was no food left in Moscow, for man or dog. Only the fleas, those dirty parasites, continued to feast. Weak from hunger and cold, unable to go one step further, I lay down in a back alley and waited for the snow to cover me.
But it turned out I wasn't alone. A human mother was crouched there too, with her children. She looked up and watched me warily for a moment, then shoved a metal bowl in my direction. I saw the hunger in her eyes and in her children's eyes as it skittered across the ice, yet she shoved the shining bowl toward me and watched me gobble up the slop that remained. That's when I realized there's something good in them that mirrors the something good in us — something a lower order creature like the Flea could never understand.
* * *
I ask the Flea what it smells like out there in the deep dark night that never ends.
"Seared steak," she whispers in my ear.
* * *
The Flea has stopped biting me — she says I'm starving. What's more, they know I'm starving. No animal can go this long without food. They know I'm starving, that my water has run out, and still He doesn't come.
Since the Flea has stopped biting me, she will soon be starving too.
"So, you're a higher order creature after all," I say.
"No, I'm still a lower order creature," she assures me. "You just don't taste good anymore."
* * *
And now the Flea is dead, though not of natural causes. I killed her. It was an accident, a reflex response to a horrible thing she said — I smashed her into the wall with my shoulder — but she shouldn't have tried me. I'm in a very sensitive state.
First she told me they have no way of getting me back. They were in too much of a hurry to figure it out — it is a race, after all. That's why the warm water burst from His eyes. That was the force beyond His control. Then she said, "But He had you there, at the Beach. He could've let you go."
My heart beats irregularly; it stutters and stops, stutters and stops. Is he tracking this, down there on his tiny planet? Is he sorry?
I have no regrets. I loved well. I was a good dog. I untether my thoughts and let them float away; I close my eyes and fix my gaze on the bright blue ball in my mind. I sit and breathe as I've done so many times before — perhaps this is what I was training for all along. The voice in my head has at last gone silent, and I can hear the music of the spheres.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Protester Has Been Released by Janet Sarbanes. Copyright © 2016 Janet Sarbanes. Excerpted by permission of C&R Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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