(From "A Month of Bedtime Stories: Thirty-one Bite-sized Tales of Wackiness and Wonder for the Retiring Child")
Jeanie and the Astrofish
What a day day you had today. You must be very tired after all that traveling in the desert and all that …
What? You can’t remember any of it? I suppose it must be that knock on your head that made you forget. You're always getting knocks on the head, aren't you?
Let me tell you all about it.
We were going to have bananas and custard, yum yum! But unfortunately we found that we didn’t have any bananas.
So you said, “Don’t worry, I know where to get bananas.”
And off you went to the woods.
When you got to the woods, you went to the stream and took off your shoes and socks. Then you went paddling in the water and started lifting up rocks to see if there were bananas underneath. You found a fish; you found a frog; you even found a hippopotamus. But you didn’t find a banana.
“That’s strange,” you thought. “I’m sure bananas come from under rocks in streams.”
Sometimes you can be a little bit silly, but that’s OK – we still love you.
You kept on searching, and after a while you found a very smooth, round, black, rubbery-looking rock. You pulled it but it was difficult to lift. So you pulled and pulled and pulled until ‘SHLOP!’ up it came. You looked underneath, but there were no bananas – just a big drain hole. Suddenly all the water from the stream started disappearing down the drain hole, then it made a ‘SSSHLUURP’ sound and all the water was gone. You’d pulled out the plug!
The stream was now completely dry, and all the fish and the frogs and the hippopotamuses were lying on the dried-up stream bed unable to swim and looking very uncomfortable.
“Look what you’ve done!” said the fish.
“We’re very uncomfortable!” said the frogs.
“Give us back our water!” said the hippopotamuses.
“We need water to breathe!” said the fish.
“Actually, we don’t need water to breathe,” said the frogs, “because we’re amphibians.”
“And we don’t need water to breathe either,” said the hippopotamuses, “because we’re mammals.”
“We don’t need water to breathe either,” said the fish, “because we’re not fish. We’re hedgehogs.”
And all the fish took off their fish masks and true enough, they were hedgehogs!
“We just fancied a swim,” explained one hedgehog.
“What are we going to do now?” said another hedgehog.
“Let’s have a disco,” said a frog.
“Good idea,” said a hippopotamus.
So someone put on a disco song and all the hedgehogs and the frogs and the hippopotamuses started dancing together and having lots of fun. It looked like so much fun, you decided to join in.
Some of the hedgehogs were drinking lemonade and a few of the frogs were eating crisps, but no bananas were served, so after a while you stopped dancing and wandered away to look for bananas.
“I wonder where all the fish went to?” you wondered as you wandered.
After a long time wondering and a long way wandering, you began to feel very hot. You looked up at the sky and the sun was burning brightly. You looked around and there were no trees and no grass, just sand in every direction as far as the eye could see.
