The Egg and I

Good morning!

A very, very long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Paul the Pterodactyl and his wife Sally the Stegosaurus lived in a two-bed one-bath mid-millennium home in the Great Jungle's Cretaceous neighborhood.

One day, Paul flew home from his job as a teller at Dinosaur National Bank to find Sally waiting for him with some Very Important News.

“Eggs?” he said to her, shocked.

“Eggs!” she said to him, delighted.

She beckoned him inside their dirt and stone home on the jungle floor and into their bed-cave. Inside sat a beautiful and lovingly crafted nest containing four very large eggs. They were large, oblong, and took up a surprising amount of the bed-cave.

“Dear, I had no idea! I thought we'd been... extra safe recently?” (This was how Paul referred to their recent sexual drought.)

“So did I, Paul, but, well, here we are! We're going to be parents!”

After a long, tender look at the eggs, Paul turned to his wife and said “They are beautiful, Sally.” To top it off: “Well, I suppose it is no surprise that they are beautiful, considering they are yours, my dear,” Paul cooed.

“Oh, Paul,” giggled Sally as she embraced him.

As stegosaurus eggs took two months to hatch, Paul and Sally began to make plans for the future during the incubation period. That weekend, they repainted the guest cave with crushed berries and converted it into a children's bed-cave. While Paul worked during the day, struggling to earn a raise by the end of the quarter, Sally childproofed their home, purchased toys from the local Dino Market, and tended to the eggs, delighting in every little shake and crack they emitted.

One day, trying to earn his boss's favor, Paul elected to work a late shift after his regular one. Paul had only taken his job as a bank teller because he had few other options with the same possibility for advancement, and because his degree in cave art had failed to produce a viable career. So Paul toiled away day after day at the bank, trying and mostly failing to court his boss's favor.

He returned home very late that night, when there was barely enough light to fly by (although still enough to see the strange dot in the sky that had recently appeared). After dropping his dino-briefcase in the kitchen and hastily eating a leftover jungle salad, he wandered into the children's bedroom to see the eggs.

But as he gazed at his unborn progeny, Paul once again felt an itch that had been growing for weeks: the nagging suspicion that the eggs were just a little too big. At least, too big for a pterodactyl to be their father.

For the next month, his worries nagged at him. At work, while he spoke with bank customers of all different species, he often found himself wondering how big their eggs were.

He took to visiting the eggs frequently when he was alone. He was not entirely certain why he did this. Was it to protect them? Was it to inspect them for clues? Or perhaps to reinforce his ownership of them?

Sometimes, after another sexless night, he would lay awake in his leaf bed while Sally slept. He searched his memory for other males in her life - who had she seen, when did she see him, how big were his eggs?

But he could find nothing. No reason to suspect her.

More and more often, he roared at his wife when he felt irritable, which only led to her roaring back at him. Once, while trying to cut a leaf off of a particularly large branch for dinner, he slipped and cut his wing with a paring knife. When Sally came to help him, he roared at her, and she did not roar back.

Her not roaring back was worse.

“I don't know what to do,” he confided in his friend Tim the T-Rex at the juice bar one night.

“Here's what you do,” said Tim, as brash as ever. “You walk right up to your wife, and you tell her, 'Hey, hun. These eggs seem a little big to you?'”

“I can't do that,” said Paul between sips of juice. “She would only deny it, and we wouldn't speak for days.”

“You're too scared of your wife,” said Tim. “It's not manly. You have to learn how to take matters into your own hands, like a real apex predator.”

“But Tim, you're an apex predator, and your hands are completely useless.”

Tim glared. “Do what you want, Paul, but ask yourself this: if those eggs aren't yours, are you going to be the one to take care of them? For the rest of your life?”

“I don't know,” said Paul. “I know less and less often these days.”

One day, Paul arrived at work only to realize he had forgotten his briefcase. So he flew back home in a hurry, weaving between pterosaurs flying the opposite way on the jetstream.

But when he arrived back at home, expecting to find his wife still finishing her breakfast, he instead found Tori, the teenage trachodon girl who lived next door, watching the eggs and reading a Leaf-O-Zine.

“Mrs. Sally hired me to watch the eggs for her while she went out to do some errands,” she said.

Paul was startled. His wife had left to run errands at this hour of the day? And she had hired a sitter without asking him first?

He was obliged to return to work soon after, as his boss, a stubborn ankylosaurus with a temper, was in a foul mood, and Paul's absence was not improving it. But he thought about the incident for the rest of the day, and the flame of doubt burned brighter than it ever had before. And finally it began to hurt.

That evening, Paul returned home. Sally was home too. She made no mention of the sitter. But then, I suppose, neither did Paul.

Paul began to avoid his home and his wife. He and Tim began going to the juice bar more nights than not, and he would sometimes even pick up Fly-Thru fast food in lieu of dinner with Sally.

He would more often take the scenic route home from work, flying around the jungle and over the vast grasslands, over the kindly grazing brontosauruses, over raptors surrounding a fresh kill. He soared down into wide rocky canyons, beautiful but desolate, populated only by insects and small dinosaurs, devoid of water but for the pools that lay in the dark recesses of caves.

And sometimes, he would fly to the top of the tallest tree in the jungle and watch the sun set over the valley. Every time he went, that lone dark spot in the sky grew larger, and he found himself wishing from time to time that it would grow large enough to swallow up the whole sky, leaving nothing in its wake - no stars, no moon, no sun. But it just grew a little bit larger every day.

Paul arrived at home after a long and very stressful day at work. He walked into the kitchen and found his wife making dinner, a jungle-leaf stew with rock broth. Having already eaten, he began waddling to his rock-sofa, but Sally interrupted him.

“Did you remember to pick up the child-nest from Raptors-R-Us?” asked Sally.

“No, I forgot,” said Paul.

“Paul! The children will be here any day now. What if they hatch tonight and they have no nest to sleep in?”

“I'm sorry!” said Paul. “I had a very tough day at work. It slipped my mind.”

“Then why were you so long coming home? You come home late so often these days. And you've already eaten?”

“I took the scenic route.”

“You took the scenic route?” Sally said, with a note of suspicion.

“Yes. Around to the grasslands. I like to watch the brontosauruses.”

“Is this why you've missed so many dinners lately?”

“Yes,” Paul sighed.

“When were you planning to tell me about these little detours of yours?”

“When were you planning to tell me about hiring Tori to watch the eggs?”

(In hindsight, my friends, Paul would realize that this was the precise moment when his life truly went to shit.)

Sally was confused. “What?”

“I forgot my briefcase last month, and when I came home, you were gone and Tori was here. You hired a sitter and didn't even tell me?”

“Yes, I did. I have been working so hard lately, Paul, and I wanted to take some time to myself. I went to the salon with the girls and got my plates polished. Why does it matter?”

“I was wondering where you were, that is all. You hired Tori without telling me?”

“Yes, I did, Paul. I can make decisions on my own. She only charged me twenty pebbles, so I figured it would be fine.”

“I'm not worried about money. It just seemed like a big thing to do, to leave the eggs with someone else, without even telling me about it.”

“Well, I'm sorry I forgot to ask you, but you keep getting back so late that I never get to see you anymore.”

An intense silence filled the room.

“Why are you only saying this now, Paul? Why not a month ago?”

Paul was silent.

And then Sally asked the question that they had both been fearing.

“Paul, do you... do you think I'm cheating on you?”

“Of course not! How could you say that?”

“Then why did you think I was sneaking out?”

“Well -”

“Then why, Paul? Why?”

“Okay! I did, okay! Why else would you do that? Why would you have hired a sitter that early in the morning and then not told me about it?”

“You don't trust me! You really don't trust me! Ten years we've been together, Paul, and you think I would be unfaithful to you? That I was off fucking some random dilophosaurus at ten in the morning?”

“Why are the eggs so big, Sally?”

Sally looked at Paul, horrified.

“You really don't trust me. Wow. Okay. Well, I'm glad we learned this before you let me raise your children.” Sally was beginning to cry.

“Are they mine?”

“How dare you.”

“Answer me!”

“Of course they're your eggs! They're our eggs! The ones we've been dreaming about having together for years! And you think I've been sleeping around? That having some other man fertilize my eggs would be good enough for me?”

“Sally-”

“You've never doubted me before. But as soon as there are eggs in front of you, you start losing it. Jesus Christ.”

Sally stomped out the cooking fire with her foot and stormed into the bedroom. Paul soon realized she had locked the door, and, faced with the prospect of sleeping on the rock-sofa, he flew out the nearest window to get some fresh air.

On the jungle floor, the insects ensured that night was just as loud as day, but in the jurassic sky, the night was silent as Paul flew through the air as fast as he could. Soon he was at the tallest branch of the tallest tree.

Before him in all directions stretched the dark moonlit trees. In the sky was nothing but stars, the moon, and the dark spot, larger than ever. It was so large by now, in fact, that looking at the edges of its form, Paul could just barely see it growing larger and larger.

“I hope it swallows this whole world up with it,” Paul thought to himself.

In time, he would turn out to be right. The meteorite finally hit about a month after Paul was forced to live on Tim's rock-sofa, about three weeks after two stegosauruses and two pterodactyls hatched from Paul and Sally's eggs, and about half an hour after the Mail-Raptor left Paul's divorce paperwork on Tim's doorstep.