Half Past Four
The alarm went at half past four, which was not a time Milo had believed in until this month.
He dressed in the dark so that he would not wake his sister. He carried his boots to the front step and put them on outside. The street was blue-black and completely still. His breath went up in front of him like something he had made.
The papers came in a plastic-wrapped brick that he had to cut open with his door key. Forty-one houses. He had learned them in an order that did not match their numbers, because the order that matched their numbers meant crossing the road eleven times.
At number 30 there was a dog that had barked at him for the whole of the first week and now did not. At number 12 an old woman was always awake. She always raised one hand at the window, and he always raised one back. He did not know her name. He thought about her more than he had expected to.
By six the sky had gone the color of the inside of a shell, and Milo was hungry, and the town was beginning to make its noises.