I recall the abduction like it was just a year ago. I was dozing peacefully behind a Home Depot dumpster in Gallup, New Mexico. It was late, past twilight, and the store was closing. I ducked into the shadows as the cops did their final drive-by. I didn’t think they saw me and doubted they cared if they did.

I waited silently for a few more minutes, then stretched and yawned, gearing up for the night routine of cruising the neighborhood for dinner. I came alert when I saw some guy in a noisy pick-up with nude cowgirls wearing hats on the mudflaps. Sure enough, he tossed a half-eaten hot dog out the window. Score one.

Uh-oh, trouble! That stupid schnauzer living behind the Garden Center saw it too. We got there at the same time and squared off over what had once been an All-Beef Vienna foot-long. I growled that I saw it first and he snarled back, claiming it by nationality.

We were heading into it, tooth and nail, when the whole scene exploded in a dazzling white light! What the . . . the cops had left, what was it? I feinted left and dodged right, but wound up tangled and scooped up in a big net. I was dangling helplessly upside-down in the air.

I’m unsure if they piped in knock-out gas or if I just passed out in terror. When I came to, I was in chains, hurtling through space in a windowless ship. I had no memory of how I’d gotten there, nor any idea of how many days, months, or maybe even light-years had passed since I was grabbed.

Then suddenly, the ship stopped and the doors opened onto the most inhospitable-looking planet imaginable. Everything was frozen, bleak and forbidding. Exhausted from the long journey, I barely noticed as cold, alien hands stuffed me into a tiny cage and threw me in the cargo bay of a smaller ship. With a couple slams and a roar, we started off again. Surely we were no longer on planet earth. But this was a much shorter trip, probably to one of the planet’s outer moons.

Well, that’s about all I know, but wherever this place is, their medicine is far more advanced than Home Depot’s. Oh, sure, that stuff about . . . well, probes, you know, in inappropriate places? It’s all true. It’s really, really true.

I was poked, prodded, jabbed, stabbed and inspected from my nose to my toes. But in hindsight, so to speak, and as strange as it may sound considering how terrifying the whole thing was, it wasn’t all bad. That bullet I was carrying around in my neck? Gone. That broken tooth I got in the fight with that psycho poodle bitch? Gone! My chronic infections? Gone! All gone! These aliens live in a miraculous world!

But apparently now I’m stuck in some political limbo, living in a half-way house run by an odd pair of aliens who jabber at me all the time. Like anybody normal could understand what they’re saying, ha-ha. I think they mean well, at least they’re keeping me warm and fed, but they insist on acting like we’re BFF’s. Sheesh, aliens, who understands ‘em?

I gotta get back to Home Depot and settle the score with that schnauzer.