Pleasant Petra

Petra was pleasant.
“You’re too nice,” They said to her. “You’ll never be nufink coz you just keep giving shit away.”
And they were right, for a while.

Petra gave away her favourite jacket, and she got cold. She gave away her favourite cat, and she got sad. She gave away her favourite boyfriend, and she got cold and sad. “But,” she thought, “Nancy,” (Petra’s oldest sister) “probably needed him more than me anyway.”

One day Petra nearly blew her stack.
She began to get frustrated at about 3a.m. in the morning.

Petra had been frustrated on two occassions in her 35 years of life. The first was when she was six years old. Nancy asked to borrow Petra’s mint condition collectible trolls. Petra said: “Yes, but please be careful with them. They are mint condition collectible trolls and they mean a lot to me.” Nancy nodded and took them into her room, one by one, with a pair of mum’s good kitchen scissors. When there was not one troll left with stiff purple hair styled longer than an earlength bob Petra got frustrated. She breathed deeply and silently cried, shaking a little.
The second time Petra got frustrated was when she was swimming in the beach, enjoying the feel of salt water on her 25 year old limbs, and she watched someone steal her phone. The next day she went to the telstra shop and bought a new phone, then she went to Target to find a dress to wear to Nancy’s wedding. Petra found one she quite liked and she tried it on in the changerooms. She still quite liked it so she headed to the cashier to charge it. Five minutes later she ran back to the changerooms to find that her phone, left alone, had been reclaimed by another. Petra began to get a little frustrated, and she really wanted to call her mum to tell her about her bad luck at Target. So the next day, she bought a phone from a cheap second hand phone shop and went home to register it online. Online she discovered that her new phone was stolen property, so she took it to the police station. They kept her overnight for questioning and as she sat, in her holding cell, waiting for the sun to rise, Petra got so frustrated she growled a little bit through gritted teeth.
But, as a rule, Petra wasn’t frustrated much. She was pleasant. She never got mad, she was always polite and, if anybody hinted at wanting a thing, Petra did what she could to give it to them.
So, Petra began to get frustrated at about 3a.m. one morning and it was an interesting thing. She had been trying to sleep since 10p.m. on account of the fact that she had to wake up at 5:30a.m. to drive an hour to help her friend move to the house next door. But Petra couldn’t sleep and hadn’t been able to sleep all night. First she got a call from Timmy who had gotten too tired at work to drive, he didn’t think it was wise to get behind the wheel- so Petra got up and drove to his work and turned the radio down low so he could sleep while she drove him home. Then, she carried him inside his house, tucked him in to bed and quietly closed the door. She drove home but she couldn’t sleep because she remembered a friend, Sally, wanted her to write a letter of application for a job that would really make Sally happy. Sally had asked her for her help tonight and Petra had almost forgotten because she was knitting a scarf for Trudy’s baby, Baddox. She finished Sally’s application at 1a.m. and e-mailed it to Sally to revise. Then Petra had to take Pixie, her puppy, outside because he needed to pee. Pixie ran away and she had to chase him for 6 blocks down the road, then Pixie wanted to sniff a few bushes on the way home so Petra waited, patiently but growing a little less pleasant at every bush. When she finally got home at 3a.m. Petra discovered a forgotten key which was not in her pocket- she was locked outside and she began to get frustrated. But Petra took a deep breath and tried to think logically. She looked up at her apartment window, four storeys in the sky and decided she could climb to it. The drainpipe was strong and there were three window ledges on the way to hers. So she climbed. She removed her flipflops and left the ground and Pixie behind. Pixie’s leash kept him safely tied to the building but her teeth were in reach of Petra’s shoes so he set about eating them. When Petra reached her window she discovered it was locked but she was feeling quite frustrated now and a little less than patient so she scrunched up her fist and punched it through the glass. She cut herself quite badly but she didn’t feel much pain as she reached in, unlocked the window and pushed her way inside. Petra wrapped a teatowel around her hand and left her apartment, blocking the door open with a boot, to go get her Pixie dog. Downstairs, she held open the door of her apartment building with an old newspaper which had been left by the letter boxes and went quickly to untie Pixie. She was wrestling her left flip flop from his cheerful mouth when Chuck, her party boy neighbour stumbled past. “You’re bleeding lady,” he informed her as he entered the building, slamming the door behind him.
Petra was locked out again and she felt like she might be ready to scream. She began to think that the world was unfair. She began to question why she had pleasant for these 35 years of life. Petra wondered aloud, “Do nice people really finish-?”
But before she could complete her sad, sad sentence a giant swingset dropped out of the sky and fell onto her apartment building. The swingset was very large and very solid and it crushed the fourth floor entirely.
Petra stared up in awe at her dust-covered heap of junk home and strangely, as if in a science fiction movie, she saw something up there begin to move. A hand first, then a head, then two heads… they leant out over the rubble. “Help!” Nancy called. “Help!”
“My sweet Lord, Nancy?” Petra called up to her sister. “Are you okay up there?”
“I think, I think we’re fine, Pet’.”
“Ok, well, what are you doing on my house?”
“Petra it was the strangest thing. Pedro and I were swinging side by side on these here swings and the most abnormal thing happened- there was a gust of wind, it came from nowhere as far as I can tell, and it picked us up, picked our swingset right out of the ground. And it spun us and bumped us and flew us here- to your house. I just- I just can’t quite figure i-.”
But Nancy couldn’t continue to be confused because, out of nowhere just the same as before, a bed fell on top of Petra’s house. In it was Timmy who couldn’t drive himself home. In his bed. Where her roof should be. He was quickly joined by Trudy and baby Baddox and Sally and the lady to whom she’d given her jacket and the boy who’d adopted her cat, and everybody who Petra had ever been pleasant to- Plop. On top of her crumbly apartment.
“Well, isn’t this a kick in the head,” Petra mumbled, more confused than frustrated for now.
While the firemen began to pick her friends out of the rubble Petra sat, stroking Pixie’s fur and wondering what she would do without a place to live. She supposed she could be a homeless person quite easily, she wouldn’t miss too much of what she’d never really had.

But then a doctor came walking by, he hadn’t been able to sleep on account of a buzzing mosquito which had come in through a window he’d left open because his cat liked the fresh air. The doctor saw Petra, sitting on the side of the road with a bleeding teatowel wrapped around her hand and he came over and put a hand on her shoulder. And a bolt of lightning zipped across the sky and came to land on Nancy’s house across the city and it began to burn and make a spectacularly beautiful backdrop for this magical type of meeting. Two pleasant people, one electrical instant. It was love. And it was lovely.

Petra received compensation times five for her broken apartment and belongings. She received more than was standard because it appeared that at least five acts of God had ocurred and contributed to the destruction of her home. She felt sorry for the insurance man when she purchased her home so she’d gotten more act of God coverage than the regular person. While her hand healed her new doctor friend, Dicky he was called, insisted on keeping her under ‘round the clock surveilance, in his spare bedroom. He made her breakfast each morning and removed her stitches gently when it was time. He was kind and gentle and patient.
Dicky made Petra want to hum, so she did hum and she hummed a catchy ditty. And she hummed it in the video store and she hummed it in the supermarket, and one day, she hummed her catchy ditty in the park, walking Pixie, and an advertising executive heard her catchy ditty and it was just what he was after for one of his high-profile commercials.

He paid Petra for the tune and offered royalties for it’s use. She signed the contract with a pleasant smile and went home to show Dicky what they, together, had done.

Twelve months after a swingset landed on Petra’s apartment and a mosquito buzzed in the doctor’s home their love had became the forever kind. And they were happy, ever after, being pleasant to one another and pleasant still to others.

Pleasant Petra