My Childhood Maid, Petra

Gideon was about to start his third of four final papers when the doorbell rang. Probably for someone else in the house, he thinks. 

Matt, his roommate, goes to the door, and looks out the peephole. 

“Yo, Gid, it’s for you!”

Gideon gets up and sprints over from his room to the hallway, and then starts walking at a socially acceptable pace to the door. 

He looks through the peephole, and opens the door as fast as he can.

“Petra!” He yells. Behind the door, a blue, wrinkled pterodactyl stands. Her wings are folded in around her front, and she spreads them to their full length in the hall, reaching nearly sixteen feet across. She wears her glasses, but instead of the black maid outfit with a white apron Gideon normally sees her in, she wears a pair of kid’s jeans on her legs, and her shirt says, ‘Ptotally Awesome’. She opens her mouth, revealing long, fang-like teeth. “How have you been, my boy?” She asks.

“I’m alright. Better now that you’re here. This one professor is a real jerk.”

“Language!”

“Sorry, but he is. Gave us a test on the last day of class, and now we have to write a paper in a week that’s at least 5,000 words.”

“Why not just go by pages? Why do words?”

“I think he wants us to constantly check how many words we have written, when it’s way easier to see how far along a page you are.”

“I am sorry Deon, that professor is, as you say, a jerk.”

Gideon starts laughing.

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too. I wish I didn’t have to go.”

Petra fixes her glasses.

“I know, but you have that-uh”

“Yes,” Petra says, and then they speak in unison, “Pterodactyl business.”

“What is that, exactly?”

“You know, flying around the Earth, seeing if there are any other living male pterodactyls in unexplored terrain, while having the goal of saving a thought to be extinct species of which I'm the last surviving member. That business.” Petra smiles, closing her eyes behind the glasses. 

“May I meet your roommates?”

“If you come in, it’s gonna be a whole thing, and Matt’s drinking, so he’ll probably make a pass at you.”

Petra blushes. “At me?” She puts a hand up to her mouth. “Well, it has been quite some time.”

“Not what I want to hear!”

“I figure, I’m not your maid anymore, and we are adults now, we can discuss these things.

“Just because we can doesn’t mean I want to.”

Petra looks at the ground. “Do you want to come outside and talk to me then?”

“Sure.”

Gideon grabs a hoodie from his room, and puts his juul in a pocket. As he walks across the room towards his door, he turns back and looks at his open laptop on the desk, title of the paper written, “I can’t do another year of this shit”. Then he approaches it and shuts the laptop, as if the thought of blowing off the work won’t haunt him if his laptop’s asleep, and he heads out the door to Petra. 

“Let’s go.”

Despite the prospect of conversation and endless topics looming before them, they walk silently towards the outdoors. The clock nears 9PM, basically morning for the both of them. A whole night ahead, the best feeling in the world, one Gideon’s almost forgotten with finals going on.

The sun set a week ago for Gideon, and now he’s existed on finals time. Waking up past sunset, sleeping as the sun rises, existing in the wee hours of the night where there are no distractions from his work, besides the most distracting of all, his thoughts.

They reach the end of the hallway and finally get outside. There’s a bench in front of the dorm they sit on, forcing Petra to fold her wings in, and Gideon pulls out his juul, taking a rip, and blowing out the smoke.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a juul. Kind of like a cigarette, but better flavor.”

“Can I try it?”

“Y-yeah, sure.”

He passes Petra the juul, and she grabs it with the hands which end halfway down her wings. She inhales for three times as long as Gideon did, and he looks amazed, but scared for the coughing sound she may make. A stream of smoke pours out of her nostrils. 

Gideon gets that feeling like he's drinking with his mom for the first time. It feels wrong. Figuring out there's a whole different side to a person you've known your entire life, and not being sure if you didn't see it because you were a kid, or if it just never materialized around you. 

“Why’d you come tonight?” Gideon asks. 

“I can’t just visit you?”

“No, you can, but you don’t. So something’s up.”

“You’re right." She stands up, pacing back and forth

"I just want a normal day, like we used to have. When you've been alive as long as I have, it seems like only yesterday I would clean your room and cook for you. You probably remember all of that better than me, and I hope you do because I may not be here for much longer. There's no easy way to put this. I have cancer."

"Shit." He pauses, unsure what to say. "Is it bad?"

"Yes." 

"Sorry that's a dumb question, of course it's bad, I just didn't know you could even get cancer."

"Nor did I! It is quite bad. I don't know how much longer I'll be alive, and even though I've been working to restore my species to the prominence we once saw, none of those goals have come to fruition. It was all for nought. I know you can't know how I feel, but-"

"Why were you a maid for us, for all those years, when you could be doing so much more important things?"

"I used to ask myself the same question. It's not like I needed the money. In the past few years since I stopped being your maid, I lost myself in my work. I thought my meaning was all for that one goal, and it never once occurred to me that I might not accomplish it. Why would I still be on this earth, if not to rescue my species? Now I've realized I'm only here to die, to be the last, and at first I felt an immense pain in my heart, knowing my goal wouldn't be accomplished."

She coughs, a sick, wretched cough from her chest, wings beating back and forth quickly. He had never seen her cough since he was a child. 

"I thought, what a waste, being with you. But now, I realize those years were the best of my life, being with your family. It's been so long since I had a family of my own, like when I was with my mother, and somehow living with you filled that void. I knew it was only temporary, because you are human, and I am a pterodactyl. But what does it matter if you are human? You were there for me, and I want to be there for you."

Petra leans over, using her wings to hold herself arched over the ground.

“Do you want to go for a ride?”

“You sure you can still carry me?”

“Oh, please. I’m not that old.”

Gideon wonders how old she is, something he never figured out about her, but refrains from asking. Never ask a woman her age. Is that rule eliminated if that woman is a pterodactyl? He climbs on the same way a normal child would for a piggy back ride. He holds onto the part of her head which comes straight out and back.

"Oh, you've grown."

"I might be able to fly with you now!"

"Ha! You know, in pterodactyl tongue, it is considered a high honor to make us laugh. We aren't just uncultured beasts, like hyenas, gangling around."

And before Gideon can respond, she shoots off into the air, at a speed not nearly as fast as he imagined it was when he was a child, but quick enough to force his mouth shut against the wind. She goes straight up at first, forcing Gideon to hold on for dear life, just like in the old days. Like a living, unpredictable rollercoaster which never gets old, except Gideon didn’t like rollercoasters. Couldn’t trust them. Petra he could trust though.

Petra takes a sharp turn to straighten herself out, so Gideon doesn’t have to hold on so tight, and now she flies in a straight path, parallel to the ground. The cold wind pierces his hoodie, making him wish he wore a heavier jacket. The same regret he felt a million times as a kid on these rides. There was something nostalgic about the regret itself, and not even the ride. Maybe because he overlooked new terrain at his college, a pterodactyl’s eye view which he often wondered about, it prevented him from feeling how he felt before over his hometown.

Overlooking his college campus was something he dreamt of often, and his dreams of it were wrong. Instead of a dark appearance like his hometown due to the lack of streetlights, everything appeared oddly illuminated. People walked and conversed, and shopped and ate outside, all in his view. Knowing they didn’t know he saw them he felt like a stalker. He wasn’t close enough to make out faces, but he could see a line outside of a bar, and groups walking, and it would be impossible for them to make out him and Petra up in the sky. 

Gideon turns his gaze to Petra, and the flight allows them to forget the past and their shortcomings in staying in contact, which was difficult because Petra didn’t have a cellphone (for obvious reasons), and for a short evasive moment it seems like Petra doesn’t have cancer and he doesn’t have a final paper due tomorrow which he needs to write when he gets home and there’s another moment where he doesn’t feel like a piece of shit for comparing those two as if there is some scale where they don’t sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. As quick as it came though, the moment’s gone, and the regret surfaces as Petra lands. There’s still so much to talk about and so little time. Eight years down the drain without her. Were they silent for this entire ride because they had so much to talk about it would be impossible to settle on one topic, or because there was no need for words between the two? Gideon was unsure.

Somehow they find themselves in front of that same bench where she told him about her cancer, and he can’t erase the thought from his mind. 

“I love you, Deon.” He goes in to hug her, and if he were a child he would cry, but he’s not so the tears aren’t appropriate, even though he feels like a child right now.

“I love you too.”

Just like when she left when he was a kid, she must leave now, except now her return is uncertain. He doesn’t want to end the hug, but he must, so he does. 

He flips open his laptop, and looks at the closed blinds to the window of his room. Then at the twin bed with no mattress pad, calling to him the way death called to the dinosaurs, except for Petra. He slowly opens the blinds, letting the light in, and puts his hands on the keyboard. He doesn’t want to write, but he must, so he does.