Before the Asteroid

It was Tuesday.

A perfectly ordinary Tuesday, sixty-six million years ago.

Fern knew it was Tuesday because on Tuesdays the big dragonflies came out near the swamp, and sure enough, there they were — zigzagging over the water like tiny, shimmering helicopters, their wings catching the early morning light.

Fern stretched her long neck and yawned. She was a young parasaurolophus, which meant she had a beautiful curved crest on top of her head that she could blow air through like a trumpet. She hadn't quite figured out how to make it sound good yet. Mostly it came out like a surprised goose.

"BWAAAANK."

See? Like that.

Her mother lifted her head from the fern bed where she'd been sleeping. "Fern, sweetie, it is very early."

"But it's Tuesday," Fern said, as if that explained everything.

And to Fern, it did.

Because Tuesdays were her favorite day. Not for any spectacular reason. Not because anything huge or amazing or earth-shaking ever happened on Tuesdays. Just because Tuesdays were the days when everything felt exactly, perfectly right.

She trotted down to the river first, like she always did. The water was warm and muddy and tasted a little bit like rocks, which Fern thought was the best flavor water could possibly be. She drank until her belly sloshed.

Then she found her best friend, Cob.

Cob was a triceratops, which meant he had three horns and a big bony frill around his head and absolutely no idea how wide he was. He was always bumping into things. Trees. Rocks. Other dinosaurs. Once, somehow, a mountain. It was a small mountain, but still.

"Cob!" Fern called.

Cob turned around too fast and knocked over a cycad tree.

"Oh no," he said, looking at the fallen tree. Then he looked at Fern. "That was already like that."

"It was not."

"It might have been."

Fern grinned. "Come on. Let's go to the ridge."

The ridge was their spot. It sat high above the valley, and from the top you could see everything — the dark green forest stretching out forever, the silver thread of the river, the volcanoes way off in the distance puffing out lazy clouds of smoke, and the sky, the great wide sky, going on and on in every direction, so blue it almost hurt to look at.

They climbed together, Fern's long legs carrying her easily over the rocks, Cob crashing through the underbrush behind her like a very enthusiastic boulder.

At the top, they flopped down in the grass.

"I like Tuesdays," Fern said.

"I like Tuesdays too," Cob agreed. "Mostly because you're always in a good mood on Tuesdays, which means you don't yell at me for knocking things over."

"I don't yell. I observe loudly."

They lay there for a while, watching the clouds drift by. One looked like an ankylosaurus. One looked like a giant fern leaf. One looked like nothing at all, which Fern decided was her favorite, because it could be anything.

"What do you want to do today?" Cob asked.

Fern thought about it. "Everything," she said.

So they did.

They raced through the meadow, where the grass came up to Fern's chin and way, way over Cob's head, so all she could see was a trail of flattened grass and the sound of Cob yelling, "AM I WINNING? I FEEL LIKE I'M WINNING!"

He was not winning. But Fern let him think he was, at least until she lapped him.

They found a grove of ginkgo trees and ate until their mouths were full and their cheeks were sticky with sap. Cob tried to eat a pinecone and made a face like he'd just discovered betrayal.

"Why," he said, spitting it out, "would a tree make something that looks so delicious and then make it taste like that?"

"Maybe it's not for you," Fern suggested.

"Everything is for me," Cob said with great confidence. "I have three horns."

They waded into the shallow part of the river and watched the little fish dart between their feet. A huge dragonfly — one of the Tuesday dragonflies — landed right on the tip of Cob's nose horn, and he went very still, and very cross-eyed, trying to look at it.

"Don't. Move," Fern whispered.

"I'm not moving."

"You're breathing too loud."

"I have to breathe, Fern."

The dragonfly stayed for three perfect seconds, then lifted off and vanished into the warm afternoon air.

They played hide-and-seek in the forest, which Fern always won because Cob's hiding strategy was to stand behind a tree that was half his size and whisper, "You can't see me, you can't see me, you can't see me."

She could see him. She could always see him.

But sometimes she pretended to search for a while, just because he got so happy about it.

As the afternoon stretched long and golden, they climbed back up to the ridge. The sun was getting lower, painting everything in shades of orange and pink and soft purple. The volcanoes in the distance had stopped puffing. Even the wind had gone quiet, like the whole world was holding its breath just to watch the evening arrive.

Fern's mother appeared at the bottom of the ridge and called up to her. "Fern! Time to come home, sweetheart!"

"Five more minutes!"

"You said that twenty minutes ago!"

This was true. Fern was not great with time. To be fair, minutes hadn't been invented yet.

She looked out at the valley one more time. The river. The forest. The sky turning colors she didn't have names for. A flock of pteranodons gliding home in a long, lazy line across the horizon.

"Today was a good day," she said quietly.

Cob nodded. He had grass stuck to his frill and mud on his nose and he looked perfectly, completely happy. "It was a really good day."

"Same thing tomorrow?" Fern asked.

"It'll be Wednesday tomorrow."

"So?"

"So... yeah. Same thing tomorrow."

Fern smiled. She blew through her crest one more time — BWAAAANK — and the sound echoed out across the valley, bouncing off the hills, ringing through the trees, sailing up into the wide and ancient sky.

Somewhere, a dinosaur she'd never met honked back.

She laughed, and Cob laughed, and they made their way down the ridge together as the first stars blinked on, one by one, like tiny silver eyes opening for the very first time.

Fern fell asleep that night in the fern bed next to her mother, warm and full and tired in the best way. The kind of tired you get from a day where you did everything you wanted with the one you wanted to do it with.

Outside, the night was soft and still. Insects hummed. The river whispered. The stars turned slowly overhead, the same stars that would still be there sixty-six million years later, shining down on a world that would look so different and yet still have meadows, and rivers, and ridges, and dragonflies, and friends finding ways to fill a perfectly ordinary day with everything that matters.

It was Tuesday.

Just a regular, wonderful, ordinary Tuesday.

And it was enough.