Rory and the dinosaur under the hill
About 5 minutes read slowly. For age 4, and anyone else who is not sleepy yet.
Rory was four, and he had one thing to say about bedtime: he was not tired. He said it at the tap, and he said it at the towel, and he said it loudest from under the covers, where he lay with his dinosaur, a green one with a soft tail and one button eye.
Outside, the garden went dark in slow layers. First the shed went. Then the fence. The hill behind the house stayed longest, a great shape lying against the sky.
“Do you know what is under that hill?” Rory’s mother had said once, at the window. “A dinosaur. A very old, very sleepy one. It has been sleeping under there since the world was small.”
Rory had thought about that every night since.
Tonight he thought about it a little harder, and the hill seemed to breathe. Up, very slowly. Down, very slowly. Nothing breathes like that unless it is asleep.
His dinosaur in his arms breathed too, small and quick. Rory held it closer.
And then, from under the hill, so quietly he nearly missed it, came a sound. A long, slow sound, like a sigh the size of a house.
“Aaaah.”
Rory held very still. The sigh came again, softer. It was not a scary sound. It was the sound of someone settling, the way you settle when the blanket is finally right.
“Goodnight, ferns,” rumbled the hill, in a voice so deep it was hardly a sound at all. “Goodnight, moss. Goodnight, small stones.”
It was saying goodnight to everything, Rory realised. The way he did, when his mother pointed at the window: the moon, the street, the cat on the wall.
“Goodnight, moon,” rumbled the dinosaur under the hill.
“Goodnight, garden. Goodnight, little house that leans on my side. Goodnight, small one in the window.”
Rory went warm all over. The small one was him.
He lay back against the pillow and said goodnight to things too, whispering, so the dinosaur under the hill would not have to talk loudly. “Goodnight, dinosaur,” he said. “Goodnight, hill.”
The hill did not answer. It only breathed. Up, so slowly. Down, slower still.
Somewhere far under the ground, a tail the size of a boat curled a little tighter, and a great head tucked down into dreams of ferns and rain and green.
Rory’s dinosaur yawned in his arms. Or perhaps that was Rory.
The hill went on breathing, up and down, up and down, patient as the moon.
Rory matched his breath to it without knowing, slower, and slower, and softer.
Under the hill, the dinosaur slept. On the hill, the grass slept. In the house that leaned on the hill, a small boy slept, one green dinosaur in his arms.
Goodnight, Rory.