wants a Captain Kirk story: space travel, stardust, alien planet, romance. He once fed us astronaut ice cream, its flavor uncanny. My sister’s Neapolitan sandwich crumbled to powder, dispersed on ocean breeze. Her cries were drowned by the wind but he made us share provisions as we drank Tang atop space blankets, surrounded by a warming planet’s shifting sands. Solar rays, reflected by the silver surface to brown my mother’s skin more intensely, burned my nose strawberry. It delaminated in sheets borne off by gulls. This is and is not surprising. Dad studied geology and psychology. Was a science teacher, until students proved alien. A stint in the Air Force as potential NASA pathway. Gravity defeated him, exacted its price for warp speed. Though he once worked for the airlines, remembers fondly his travel days. It was my mother who bound him to earth and my younger self. We entered his orbit, discoveries to be studied and documented with scientific precision. Our destiny, written in the stars. Five more offspring followed. Photos series: me, aged two. Rustling pink taffeta dress, itchy anklets edged in lace, stiff white Mary Janes. Dangling, then dropping, Mother’s pocketbook into the Sound. Beaming for the camera. Her reaction, rushing the lens. Close-up rouged lips shout at the photographer. Dad had priorities. We might have been Martians. Thousands of markings fill the walls, notebooks, albums. Film reels in olive green tins. So much data. Devotions to Sinbad and Odysseus, Icarus.  Hot air balloons and sailboats, floating islands made by hand. Fearsome Circe, Cyclops, Minotaur. Planets full of apes. Mindscapes colonized by Shatner and Nimoy. Asimov. Last name Ellison, unrelated to Harlan. Some intelligent being planned this, laughing. We were his ambassadors, mimeses sans mustache.