ABDUCTED!

Chapter Two: Grandma Giuseppina's Meatballs
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I was walking across campus sometime in the wee hours when they grabbed me.  Grabbed isn’t the right word -- I was just sort of enveloped and transported. Hey, I thought it was because I was high, stoned, really. Thought I was just floating in the cannabis smoke. Coming back from my girlfriend’s dorm room, where we’d smoked pot and done the deed. I was feeling very good, although starting to worry about my midterm in differential equations that started in five hours. Why did I sign up for an early morning math class?

All of a sudden there was complete silence and a feeling as if I had a head cold. Then I saw my Grandmother Giuseppina cooking up a storm at her old GE range and the next thing I knew “Grannie Jo” was throwing meatballs at me and I was ducking right and left, but one hit me square in the middle of the forehead and everything went black. What a strange thing to go through one’s mind while being abducted by aliens, and don’t I know it, but hey, that’s what happened.

I woke up in some kind of vertical glass or plastic tube. I was upright, but as far as I could tell, I wasn’t standing on my own two feet, as the expression goes, just floating, looking out on a very sterile, small, greenish-gray room. The first thing that went through my mind was that I was in a morgue. But I wasn’t cold. Comfy really.

Gradually the tube starting rotating. After a few rotations, it tipped until I was horizontal, still just floating there. The tube rotated again and I started feeling woozy. The tube stopped rotating and returned to vertical. Then I went to sleep.

When I woke up I was sitting in my grandmother’s living room on her old, threadbare green couch with the fuchsia pillows. There was a smell of mildew, mothballs, and meatballs. A man was sitting across from me on the recliner that my Grandpa Vincenzo used to sit in. He was not my grandpa.

Next Week: Algebra Could Be Useful To Me Someday