Funerals in space

They gave us a lab rat while we were up there. I knew it was a bad idea from the start. Actually, I was anxious about looking after it and the possibility of it escaping from its little cage. Little did I realise that the problems would be far more complex than that. You see, my fellow astronaut, Boris, and I, we got fond of old Ratsie. We bestowed upon him the affectionate epithet “The Great Ratsby”. While our command officers were instructing us to complete our in-space experiments on him, we could no longer bring ourselves to…

Meanwhile, my wife’s great aunt had passed and she was dealing with a funeral director in Perth. She would describe the funeral service to me over our interstellar webcam, including the procession at the funeral home. She was particularly impressed with the flower spray — red roses on a burnished black box. I listened sympathetically, little realising we’d soon be having a funeral service of our own…

I woke up to a scream. It was the scream of a little girl, but when I bolted upright in my capsule, smacking my head against the upper bunk, I saw Boris, palms to face, jaw hanging low over Ratsby’s cage, the rat dead under flood lights.

After all that talk my wife gave about funerals in Perth, I had an idea or two as to how we could give Ratsby his final farewell. I wrote the eulogy and prepared a casket from the cardboard of our astronaut instant noodles, and then we attempted the cremation, and that’s when everything went bad…

The fire from the cremation ceremony set off the smoke alarms, particles of ash and dead rat floated into the shuttle atmosphere, and our commanding officer immediately recalled us to earth. That was the end of that mission.