The sunrise really was beautiful, Lily thought, staring out into the distance. It was school holidays and Alby, as always, was staying over for a while. He wasn't up yet, though. No-one was, yet, although her father'd be up soon. For the moment, Lily just enjoyed watching the sun rise.

She could just make out a tiny object moving near the horizon. 'Probably a rabbit,' she thought, 'Damned rabbits - they even ate most of mum's veggie garden.'

From her vantage point - the railing of the wrap-around verandah - she could easily make out the half eaten, half wilted remains of Zoe's attempt at being 'ecological' and 'sustainable.' They'd discovered that when seed companies say 'full sun' they mean 'plant suitably close to trees in a neighbourhood that gets a nice, moderate dose of sun,' not 'plant in the middle of a desert right under a hole in the ozone layer.'

The little blob kept coming closer to the failed veggie patch and Lily felt suitably inclined to go and shoo the horrid thing away - rabbits got into everything and built their holes in the most annoying of places.

She jumped off the railing and started heading towards the abandoned vegetable garden. As she - and it - got closer, Lily realised it was much too small to be a rabbit and crept closer. She had half a mind to quickly go back to the farmhouse to wake everyone up so they could discover it together, but it was only half a mind and the spell of dawn quickly silenced the thought.

Once they had both reached the garden bed, Lily saw that it was a mouse. A hopping mouse. They'd befriended a hopping mouse in Death Valley too, before Horus decided it'd make a nice snack. Nervously, the cute little mouse hopped over to inspect Lily's foot. 'It's very tame,' she thought, 'I wonder wether it was someone else's pet a long time ago.'

Lily bent down to see if it would let her pat it when a bang echoed from the house. Her father was up, and with him, Horus. With a finely tuned sense of self-preservation - as if it knew Horus was now awake and ready to start the day - the diminutive mouse turned and hopped away, back towards the rising sun.