Buttons, Spaceships And Monkeys

• Oliver Johnstone, Grade 3, Lyneham Primary School
• Short Story
• 2012

Excellence Award in the 'Legendary 2012' competition

It was very exciting, Dexter the space chimp and I were on our way to Mars.
It was hard to believe we were really going.

Why I had to go with a monkey was a mystery.
But here I was.

We had just cleared the atmosphere when Dexter and I started fighting over which was the right button to press to release the rocket blasters. You might ask ‘How do you argue with a monkey in space?’
It’s simple; you have a space food fight!

I was just about to press the orange button when a banana peel hit me in the back of the head. So I whipped around and took a hot dog sausage out of my pocket and threw it at Dexter’s mouth. He wanted to press the green button.

The orange button had “release rocket boosters” printed on it. Pity monkeys can’t read because the green button said “release parachute”.

So I’d had just about enough of all this monkey silliness. I pulled open the nearest panel and ripped out a cord. Tying him up would stop the green button getting pressed.

Then our engines failed.
Bother wrong cord!

So I called up Mission Control “Huston we have a small problem. Ok we have a huge problem; I ripped a cable off the control pad to tie up Dexter so he wouldn’t press the green button. But it happened to be the power cable. Can you send up a spare thanks. Dang Dexter got out gotta go bye.”

Something hard hit me on the back of the head. The space apple hit the ground with a thud. I could see a dot in the distance. Something really hard hit me on the head and I fell to the ground in pain. I saw Dexter jump over me and he whacked down the green button. I had failed. Out went the parachute and we started plummeting towards earth. We entered the atmosphere and fire went around the ship.

We were just about to hit the ground when the parachute saved us.
We may not have got to the Mars but we were safe.