Two enormous windows high up on the concrete walls of the basement admitted the only light into the basement. The windows might have provided a route of escape from the basement if they hadn't been positioned hundreds of feet up a vertical cliff.
No, ascending to either of the two windows was as unlikely as was ascent up the colossal flight of stairs. The tiny man, however, was thankful for the windows. Not only did they provide light, they allowed him to keep track of the passage of days.
So far, he had spent two nights in the basement, huddled in his lodging that was nothing more than a space between the stacks of enormous cardboard boxes along one wall. During the fitful sleep between light and darkness, he often dreamed of gigantic teenagers and the destruction they could bring to helpless insects.
He had awoken not too long ago to his third morning in the basement when diffused light shone through the windows and cast everything in the basement in a dull gray.
He slept on a scrap of paper that at least didn't require him to bed down on the hard, cold concrete. His scrounging around the basement had not found anything that could serve as even modest clothing, so he continued to go about naked as he explored the seemingly endless basement.
His attempts to find food and water had proved as futile as the one to find clothing, until yesterday. A slow leak from the towering water heater crammed into a space beneath the stairs had formed a pool of water on the concrete floor. The little man, who might have been concerned about a leak in his water heater had he been normal size, rejoiced at the discovery as he drank from the pool of stale water by dipping his hands into it. Lacking any means to collect the water, however, he was now obliged to make the long trek from the cardboard boxes to the water heater every day just to quench his thirst.
The long trek took him past the long-forgotten exercise bench, and on this day he noticed something. He saw it atop a folded towel that he must have left behind on the floor beneath the bench the last time he had made use of the exercise bench.
The red, gold and brown foil gleamed in the dull light, but he would have recognized it even without the large letters that spelled out "ENERGY BAR."
His empty stomach rumbled at the thought of the oatmeal and chocolate bar, which looked big enough to provide him an inexhaustible supply of food, or at least enough food to hold out until someone came to the basement.
He found plenty of knotty handholds in the fabric of the towel and quickly climbed onto the vast, white surface of the towel and ran toward the discarded energy bar.
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