Space Monkeys

• Vera Ogienko, Grade 4
• Short Story
• 2018

‘Boss, we’re out of monkeys to send to space! It’s too cold here. They all ran away.’
‘What? The snow is only half a meter deep!’ (Yelling at somebody on the other side of the phone line), ‘Hey, don’t touch that!’. (Back on the phone), ‘Sorry, my daughter just broke something. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a full house of monkeys!’
‘Boss? I think I have an idea...’
*************
The phone rang. I ran downstairs to get it. ‘Hello, who is this?’
‘This is Space Agency. You, Lana Marana, have been selected to go to the International Space Station. Meet your fellow astronauts at the space agency HQ tomorrow at 7 o’clock.’
I could not believe I was going to be an astronaut!
I told my parents about the phone call during supper. When my mum heard this, she smiled in a very big smile and admitted she enrolled me into the program some time ago as a present. She then put up a worried look on her face and said:
‘I’m a bit scared for you. Space is dangerous.’
‘Mum I’m just going to the ISS. People have been there hundreds of times. And plus, I bet I’m gonna get lots of training. It is not like they are going to send us to Mars.’
‘Will they?’
‘Of course not! Nobody has been there yet. They would send monkeys to test the environment first.’
*************
Beep-beep-beep, sounded my alarm. Today I was officially starting training to go to space!
As I got dressed I started thinking about the space and all of its beautiful features: galaxies, planets, asteroid and stars. I wandered what it be like to be up there in a rocket.
When I arrived, I only had to take one quick glimpse at the people there to realise that this was not a friendly place.
Then the loud speaker said, - Could all the kid astronauts head to the room 3769 immediately!
I turned to the man standing next to me, - Excuse me. Do you know where room 3769 is?
The man stared at me like I was something green hanging out of a toddler’s nose and just walked away. At that moment I noticed a big sign that said “room 3769” with a big green arrow pointing to a corridor on my left. By the time I got to the room, they have already started, so the astronaut that was lecturing us shouted the life out me. All that just for being a tiny bit late!
The rest of training was vigorous, terrifying and very rude. But after a horrid year, I finally got into a rocket on a launch pad. I was so nervous-s-s! I thought that If I calculate the trajectory to the ISS, that would make me feel a little bit better. But doing this made me feel even worse. I calculated the numbers again because it could not be true, but it was. We were going to Mars!