The presses ran at four in the morning, which is how the last edition came to be a good edition. Every figure in it correct. Every column set clean. A boy carried the bundles out to the corner at ten past five and went home to his bed, and it is only fair to say he made his deadline.
The number is true. That is the part worth sitting with. Not a lie, not propaganda, not some cruel little joke set by a man with a sense of humour — simply an accurate fact about the closing bell, sourced and checked twice and lying face up in a gutter running with the melt off a street that no longer has a name.
He walks past without looking down. He has read it. He reads everything. It changes nothing and was never going to change anything, and the awful small dignity of the thing is that it was right.
