#MilitantFactionsQuotes 19: The boy had found a place to sleep where he felt safe and dry

#MilitantFactionsQuotes 19:

The boy had found a place to sleep where he felt safe and dry, close to the hospital and far from hardcore Holloway Road... tucked just inside the Waterlow Park, East Side, the Highgate Hill entrance north of the mental hospital, in among the shrubbery but raised slightly on a muddy knoll so that rain water never dampened his sleeping bag and all he had to worry about were the city’s vulpine scavengers. Back home he’d never been an early riser (mum flipping back the sheets, dad throwing ice-buckets) but since arriving in North London he’d risen with the sun or, more frequently, the mist and dew.

Today the sun was a cold yellow disk nailed to the grey canvas sky but its milky light woke him even though its heat didn’t warm him, so he rose, stiff, aching, hid the sleeping bag in a bush, went to the Turkish convenience store on the corner for his carton of milk and dry duck-bread, then sat on a bench, humming.

-From "Waterlow Sunrise", first published in Literary Commune (2015), and one of the stories in Mark Piggott's fiction/non-fiction collection "Militant Factions" available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.