（外文电子版资料）Stephen King - Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1).doc

Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)by Stephen King The dawn washed slowly down Culver Street. To anyone awake inside, the night was still black, but dawn had actually been tiptoeing around for almost half an hour. In the big maple on the corner of Culver and Balfour Avenue, a red squirrel blinked and turned its insomniacs stare on the sleeping houses. Halfway down the block a sparrow alighted in the Mackenzies birdbath and fluttered pearly drops about itself. An ant bumbled along the gutter and happened upon a tiny crumb of chocolate in a discarded candy wrapper. The night breeze that had rustled leaves and billowed curtains now packed up. The maple on the corner gave a last rusty shiver and was still, waiting for the full overture that would follow this quiet prologue. A band of faint light tinged the eastern sky. The darksome whippoorwill went off duty and the chickadees came to tentative life, still hesitant, as if afraid to greet the day on their own. The squirrel disappeared into a puckered hole in the fork of the maple. The sparrow fluttered to the lip of the birdbath and paused. The ant also paused over his treasure like a librarian ruminating over a folio edition. Culver Street trembled silently on the sunlit edge of the planet -- that moving straightedge astronomers call the terminator. A sound grew quietly out of the silence, swelling unobtrusively until it seemed it had always been there, hidden under the greater noises of the night so lately passed. It grew, took on clarity, and became the decorously muffled motor of a milk truck. It turned from Balfour onto Culver. It was a fine, beige-colored track with red lettering on the sides. The squirrel popped out of the puckered mouth of its hole like a tongue, checked on the track, and then spied a likely-looking bit of nest fodder. It hurried down the trunk headfirst after it. The sparrow took wing. The ant took what chocolate it could manage and headed for its hill. The chickadees began to sing more loudly. On