Laura Sereti was an avid reader and an outstanding poet, but she didn’t care for math. She lived in an old dusty orphanage on the outskirts of town. One night at 5:59 pm, one minute before lights-out, she finished her book. She tucked herself into bed and listened for nothing in particular. All she could hear was the floor creaking under the weight of the bed as she settled into it and the matron yelling in her scratchy, haggard voice, “Lights out, git in yer beds.” Laura stared at the ceiling. Ever so slowly, her half-conscious body faded away until there was nothing left.

She was running along the edge of a sludgy gray pool, dodging fiery laser beams, toward a mountain of maple-and-ginger oatmeal. A laser beam hit the ground in front of her, barely missing her left foot. She stumbled but kept going. She was getting closer, closer; she knew she had to get to that oatmeal to defeat the living sludge of the pool. She felt herself change into something small but strong. In a flash of light,  she shrank to the size of an acorn; legs popped out from the middle of her torso, antennae grew above her eyebrows, as all of the hair on her head shrank away. Then she felt her cheeks stretching, the skin getting tight over the mandibles that were growing out of the sides of her face. She realized she had turned into a stag beetle, one of the strongest insects of Earth. She flew over to the oatmeal; the whizzing laser beams narrowly missing her. She dived into the mountain of oatmeal, flinging it into the pool of living sludge, poisoning it with the ginger and maple. Then everything went black.

The heavy thud of the matron’s boots on the wood floor jolted her awake. It was another dismal rainy day. She sat up and grabbed the comb to get ready before she got into trouble. She vigorously raked the comb through her hair. As she set it down she noticed flakes of oatmeal stuck in its teeth.