Denny Bud woke up in the dark, and he did not remember his name. Perhaps it had been stolen from him the night before, as he slept. Or, perhaps he had slept through the day, he did not remember this either.
Denny Bud braced himself with the counter and pulled his aching body off of the tiled bathroom floor, where he slept because he felt it brought him closer to the Higher Power. His higher power was a hairless, half-blind rat that lived in his walls. There was a space in between the floorboard and the wall next to the toilet from which the Higher Power could emerge if necessary. Denny Bud looked at this space wistfully before exiting the bathroom. He stumbled into the kitchen, which, much like the rest of his relatively large home, was shrouded in darkness. It was too dark to be daytime, but too light to be nighttime. Denny Bud could not afford electricity, and because of this time often seemed to lose meaning in the gloomiest recesses of his home. He guessed it was either early morning or late evening. Denny Bud could have sought verification of the authenticity of either assumption, except he had sacrificed his watch to the Higher Power, who was named Fyodor, the week before.
Denny Bud's confused gaze fell upon the wall above the stove. If his meticulously kept record of tally marks was correct, which it most certainly was, moving day would arrive shortly. In fact, moving day was the very next day. Not his moving day, of course. No, he would stay in the same house. A family was coming to rent his home to make ends meet, and he had to finish moving his things into his basement before day's end. If it was morning. He was still unsure. He set to work anyway. He began with his collection of eHow articles. Denny Bud held the artisans who constructed eHow articles in high esteem, and he had every eHow article ever published (before he had quit his job and been unable to afford internet or electricity) printed out and organized in alphabetical order by task on a series of shelves. He had moved most of his eHow articles to the basement into filing cabinets he had stolen from his neighbors, but one shelf remained. He picked up the eHow articles and made his way to the bathroom. He had taken out the bathtub and dismantled the plumbing system (Which had been quite a mess, and he eventually succumbed and had plumbers come to fix it all, because h nearly flooded the basement. And the house. And the yard), and in the tub's place was an entrance to the basement. He still required entry to the main floor to leave the house and access to his altar here in the bathroom, so as not to offend Fyodor. He threw his show articles down the hole into what was essentially a ditch. Only one thing remained. Denny Bud moseyed back down the hall and collected a frame with a single piece of printer paper (which he had no use for seeing as he no longer had electricity to plug a printer in or a connection to allow the printer to function) on which his name was inscribed. Now, Denny Bud remembered his name. The frame had once housed his PhD in immunology, but he had sacrificed that to Fyodor the week before he quit his job. Instead, he wrote his name and the fact that he did, indeed have the credentials on a piece of printer paper for posterity. He was ready. He tossed the frame into the hole in the bathroom and it landed with a thud on top of the papers. He would put those things away later. He went back into the hallway to put the only thing remaining in the main house to use: a pile of bricks and the necessary tools to create a brick wall. Which he did, in the doorway to the bathroom. He had removed the door in preparation for this task. When the new family moved in, they would be unable to infiltrate this stronghold, and he would be left alone in his basement with Fyodor and his eHow articles. He finished quite quickly, and was left with a rather solid, if ghastly, brick structure that effectively sealed off the bathroom from the main house. He lugged the remaining bricks outside and threw the tools in the dumpster, as he no longer had any use for them. Finally, he walked outside into the still dim light that could indicate either early morning or late evening. If he had any idea which direction was east he could figure out the time, but seeing as his PhD was in immunology, he knew little of compasses or directions. He went back around the house and opened the window to the bathroom, and proceeded to close it and climb into the basement with the ladder. He had built this basement two months earlier, when he realized that the day he ran out of money after quitting his job (working as an undervalued employee for some other "more accomplished" immunologist in their lab) was imminent. The basement was filled with lab equipment. Considering the "basement" had been hand-dug, was supported with stacks of cinderblocks, and lacked electricity or plumbing, the lab was rather useless. But still. It was his lab. He fumbled around in the darkness, tripping on the eHow articles and smashing the glass in the frame which had once been home to his degree. Finally, he made it to the cot he had set up in the nearly pitch black corner. He rolled over onto it and sat there, waiting for some sign of Fyodor or life upstairs, while clutching the stuffed toy rat he had previously kept on his bed. A couple of hours later, he heard the sounds of the family investigating their new home. Possibly wondering where the tally makes on the kitchen wall came from, or reading the eHow article he had left on the counter entitled "How to Not Be Annoying", or considering setting rat traps to get rid of the dropping problem. But Fyodor could hear their plans, surely, and would not fall victim to such cruelty. With some calculation, Denny Bud deduced that he had slept during the night and woken up very early in the morning. With his tasks complete and most prodding questions answered, he fell asleep on the cot, dreaming sweet dreams of the bathroom tile which seemed to him to be too far away to access in that moment.
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