Mornings are the best time of day. The half-sleep, half-awake space when anything is possible. This morning was burnt toast. Bonkers was snoring and farting. The boys were running up or down the stairs, and Marla was shouting at them from the kitchen to stop because Daddy was sleeping in. The step stomping grew louder. Pretending to sleep, I smiled into my pillow. Any minute, one of the boys would bang into our bedroom to jump on our bed. The stomping sounded more like knocking, a tapping on the bedroom window. Probably a branch whacking the screen, I thought. I reached for Bonkers, our geriatric chocolate lab with god awful breath, and squeezed. He felt wrong.

The knocking became insistent. I stopped smiling. Under my hand, the lump skittered away. This wasn’t Bonkers sleeping next to me. No warm dark fur, no rough toe beans, this shape was hard and round and vibrating. Dream’s over, I thought. I wrenched the flimsy metallic sheet from my sleep platform. Goose flesh peppered my skin.

I jumped to my feet, landing hard on the dull metal floor. The ball hovered above my sleep platform. It was mirrored and I saw my face distorted glaring back at me. The eyes staring back at me, my eyes changed looking now like their eyes, all black and glistening. They were angry with me again. Something dark moved in my peripheral vision.

Three meters tall, the dark figure waited in the center of my cage. The dark figure delivered pain from its three fingertips when I displeased the customers. Part of me wanted to fight, to scream and rage, but the smell of what they did to Perkins still burned in my brain so I started my performance.

I eased around the figure ad entered the bathing chamber. The glass front of my cage went clear. I couldn’t see the crowd of zoo visitors but I felt their eyes. I washed with the water-like liquid. I rubbed the oily substance on my skin. Naturally, they kept me naked. I walked to the feeding station and waited for the bland jelly cubes that kept me alive in this jail.

I stared up. I saw past the smooth metal ceiling. My whole life I had wanted to go to space. I had to work hard, harder than the other candidates because of my dyslexia. I was never going to let anything stop me. This mission to explore the planetoids had been my dream. I remember every moment of our trip until we met the anomaly. Thinking of the alien ship made my head ache. Shaking my head, the sharp edged memory slipped away.

Now, when I dream I don’t think of space travel or Perkins and the rest of my crew, or the glow of the moons of Saturn. In my dreams, I only see Marla and our kids. I hear the third step that always squeaks. I smell pancakes and reach for a handful of warm dog fur. More jelly cubes plopped down into my serving dish. I wiped away the tears. They always fed me extra when I cried. Mindlessly I ate and wondered when I could go back to sleep.