The Astronaut's Breakfast

Pete had dreamed of being an astronaut since he was four years old. He'd built rocket ships out of cardboard boxes. He'd worn his helmet — which was really a colander from the kitchen — to bed every single night for a year. And now, finally, after years and years of training and waiting and more training, Pete was floating inside the International Space Station, two hundred and fifty miles above Earth.

And he was starving.

"Day One breakfast," Pete said to himself, rubbing his hands together. "Let's do this."

He floated over to the food station, where little packets and pouches were strapped down with Velcro. He grabbed a pouch of scrambled eggs, a packet of orange juice, and a piece of toast that came sealed in plastic like a tiny present.

"Easy peasy," said Pete.

He set the orange juice down on the table.

It floated away.

Not fast — just a slow, lazy drift, like it had somewhere better to be. Pete watched it tumble gently toward the ceiling.

"Oh," said Pete. "Right. Zero gravity."

He caught the juice pouch and tucked it under his arm. Then he opened his scrambled eggs and squeezed some onto a spoon. He brought the spoon to his mouth, but on the way there, a little golden blob of egg wiggled right off the spoon and floated in front of his nose.

Pete went cross-eyed staring at it.

"Come back here," he said.

The egg blob did not come back. It drifted left. Pete lunged left. The orange juice pouch slipped out from under his arm and floated right. Pete grabbed for it with his other hand, and the spoon — with the rest of his eggs — went spinning off behind him.

Now Pete was in the middle of the space station with no eggs, no juice, and no spoon. All three were floating in different directions, like they'd had an argument and weren't speaking to each other.

"Okay," Pete said. "New plan."

He collected everything. He Velcroed the juice to the table. He held the eggs very tightly in one hand. He put the spoon in his mouth so it couldn't escape.

Then he tried to open the toast.

Have you ever tried to open a plastic packet with one hand while holding a pouch of eggs in the other hand and gripping a spoon in your teeth?

Pete had not tried this before either.

He pulled at the toast packet. He tugged. He yanked. The packet ripped open and the toast went sailing out like a tiny, crunchy frisbee. It spun through the air in slow motion, flipping end over end, heading straight for the control panel on the far wall.

"MMMPF!" said Pete, because he still had the spoon in his mouth.

He launched himself after the toast. In zero gravity, when you push off a wall, you really go. Pete rocketed across the station, arms stretched out like a superhero, chasing a single piece of toast.

He caught it! Right before it hit the control panel!

"HA!" he shouted — and the spoon flew out of his mouth and bonked him on the forehead before drifting away again.

Pete looked down. Or up. Or sideways — it was hard to tell anymore, because he was now upside down, holding toast in one hand and eggs in the other, and his juice was still Velcroed to the table, which was now above his head.

He started to laugh.

Back on Earth, Pete had eaten breakfast thousands and thousands of times. He'd never once thought about it. You put your plate down, it stayed down. You set your cup on the table, it sat there like a good cup. Your toast didn't try to flee.

Up here, nothing worked the way his brain expected. His hands kept trying to set things down, and the things kept saying, "No thank you, we'd rather float."

"Alright, breakfast," Pete said, flipping himself right-side up — or what he decided was right-side up. "You win Round One. But I am an astronaut. I graduated top of my class. I can fly a spacecraft going seventeen thousand miles per hour. I am NOT going to be defeated by toast."

He took a deep breath and thought about it. Really thought.

Then Pete smiled.

He squeezed a blob of scrambled egg out of the pouch and let it float right in front of his face. Instead of chasing it with a spoon, he just leaned forward and — glomp — ate it right out of the air.

"Oh!" said Pete. "OH! That's fun!"

He squeezed out another blob. Glomp.

And another! This one he let float a little further before catching it in his mouth like a seal catching a fish.

He squeezed out three at once. Bloop, bloop, bloop — three golden egg blobs drifting in a row. Pete floated forward, mouth open — glomp, glomp, glomp — and got all three.

"MAGNIFICENT!" Pete shouted.

Next, the juice. He'd been trying to drink it like he would on Earth, but that was silly. This wasn't Earth! He poked the straw in and squeezed, and a wobbly, shimmering sphere of orange juice floated out. It looked like a tiny glowing planet. Pete could see the light from the window reflected inside it.

"That," Pete whispered, "is the most beautiful orange juice I have ever seen."

Then he slurped it right out of the air. It was delicious.

He squeezed out more juice spheres — big ones, little ones — and gobbled them up one by one, giggling the whole time.

Finally, the toast. Pete held it carefully and took a bite. Crumbs exploded off the toast and floated everywhere, a hundred tiny crumb-planets forming their own miniature galaxy around Pete's head.

He looked like he was wearing a crunchy, breadcrumb crown.

"Okay," Pete admitted, "the crumbs are a problem."

He spent the next fifteen minutes chasing crumbs around the station with a little vacuum tube, sucking them up one by one. A crumb behind the computer screen. A crumb near the window. A crumb that had somehow gotten inside his collar and was tickling his neck.

When he finally got the last one, Pete was exhausted and grinning and completely full.

Commander Santos floated into the module. She was the leader of the mission and had been in space three times before. She looked at Pete — who was floating upside down with toast crumb dust on his eyebrows and a smear of egg on his chin — and she smiled.

"First breakfast in space?" she asked.

"Commander," Pete said seriously, "nobody warned me about the toast."

Commander Santos laughed. "Nobody ever does. It took me three missions to stop making crumbs. You want to know the trick?"

"YES," said Pete.

"Tortillas," she said, tossing him a soft, flat tortilla that spun gently through the air. "No crumbs."

Pete caught it. He stared at it. He looked back at Commander Santos.

"You couldn't have told me this BEFORE breakfast?"

She shrugged, still grinning. "Where's the fun in that? Besides — now you'll remember."

And she was right. Pete never forgot. Not just about the tortillas, but about all of it — that everything he thought he knew about eating, about forks and plates and cups and gravity holding it all together, worked completely differently up here. And that was okay. Better than okay, actually. Because once he stopped trying to make space work like home and started letting space be space, breakfast became the most fun meal he'd ever had.

Every morning for the rest of his mission, Pete woke up excited. He'd squeeze out his little floating eggs, slurp his wobbling juice planets, and wrap everything in a tortilla — no crumbs, no chasing toast across the station.

Well. Almost no chasing. Sometimes he'd squeeze out an extra juice sphere and let it float just a little too far, just so he could dive after it.

Because honestly?

That was the best part.