text: Standing in my oversized cage, naked and spent, the aliens release me from their grip and screw the cap on their specimen vial. From what I understand, somewhere in that white, milky fluid are the seeds used for creating children. Children I will never see. This is how life has always been. I was born into a world conquered. The aliens are bipeds with baggy plastic skin and a bulging single eye that flashes glimpses of my grim, tear-stained reflection. They look nothing like us. Maybe this is how they justify what they do. There were four other boys born into this hellhole the same day as I was, but within twenty-four hours, I was the only one. The aliens were the first faces I saw. All I remembered of my mother were her screams for days after they took me away from her, though by now, I doubt that the voice I remember is hers. They had locked me in a pen near enough to cry out for her and hear her desperate reply, but never to see her. That pen became my life, and I grew to maturity a prisoner inside of it. The aliens kept me fed, and besides the extreme hours of severe boredom and filthy living conditions, I thought that maybe life could be OK, even in a prison. Once my body hit adulthood, however, the aliens began their real torture. They moved my pen beside the females. This was my first contact with anyone besides the aliens since I was born. The women packed the pens all around me, waddling their fattened bodies on fragile legs, some broken. A few of them were crying out in pain. Their naked skin was scabbed and festering with open wounds, red with infection. A tepid soup of excrement from the ground coated them up to their knees. The squeaking of loose plastic drew my attention to a nearby alien, clipping some mechanical beast to the females’ breasts while they sobbed in hopeless appeal to its apathetic eye. From day one in this new location, I hated myself for feeling desire at the sight of the women. At the same time that I wished the aliens would bring me back into isolation to suppress my shame, I was desperate to stay in the company of others like me. I tried to bury my urges, convinced myself that feeling attraction to those suffering was evil, and that I was evil for feeling it, but the aliens had other plans. The first time the aliens violated me, I learned what it felt like to be invisible. No rights. No hope. It was as though my screams for them to stop were on mute. The aliens would sooner collect my tears for their test tubes than regard them with empathy. Our torture means nothing to them, and their torment of us is as routine as sleep. In fact, some of them seem to enjoy it. At the same time, the pain is real and horrific. Imagine an alien’s hand reaching inside of you, pleasuring you to the point of climax while you watch the pathetic naked corpses of enslaved females. The women watch me back, my tear-filled eyes forced to stare at them, as the aliens sexually stimulate my body. I can see that the females cry, too, but I wonder if they do so for me, or for themselves under my perverted eyes. After so many times, my mind has learned to go somewhere else when they come gloved up to their shoulders to violate me. I can tell the aliens think this means that I like it, but I have no fight left in me to prove to them otherwise. This is my life, I suppose. I was born into this, and I will die in it. Once, I saw an alien remove their baggy plastic head. It was standing just outside of my pen and its hands lifted up the skin at its neck and peeled it back like a hood. Underneath, the alien actually had a face more like ours, with a mouth and nose and two small eyes. When they met mine, for a second, I thought I saw a glimmer of empathy. Except it plopped its single black eye and loose plastic skin back over its small inner face, and I never found out for sure, nor have I seen such hope in their kind ever since. The aliens call us “cows.” I have no idea what the word means to them, but to us, it means a life of misery at their hands.