The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

palms at it, splashing geysers of it across himself. He pulled off his robe and rolled around in the warm water. A bath, he thought. I’m having my goddam morning bath.
    After a while he got up and dried himself on what was left of the handkerchief around the sponge. Then he squeezed the water from the robe and hung it up to dry. My throat is sore, he told himself. So what? he said. It’ll have to wait its turn.
    He didn’t know why he felt so exhilarated and stupidly amused. He was certainly in a fix. It was just, he guessed, that when things got so bad they were absurd, you couldn’t take them straight any more; you had to laugh or crack. He almost imagined that if the spider came lumbering over the edge of the block now, he’d laugh at it.
    He ripped up the handkerchief with teeth, nails, and hands, and made a flimsy robe of it, tying up the sides as he had done with the other robe. He put it on hastily. He had to get over to the sewing box.
    Picking up the heavy pin, he threw it to the floor, then climbed down the cement block and retrieved it. I’ll have to find another sleeping place now, he thought. It was amusing. He might even have to go up the great cliff face after that slice of dry bread. That was amusing, too. He shook his head as he jogged across the floor toward the carton, sunlight streaming through the windows over him.
    It was like the time after he’d broken the contract. There were all the bills, the pitiless insecurity, the problems of adjustment. He’d tried to go back to work. He’d begged Marty, and Marty had reluctantly agreed. But it hadn’t worked. It had got worse and worse until one dayTherese had seen him trying to climb onto a chair and had picked him up like a boy and set him on it.
    He’d screamed at her and gone storming to Marty’s office; but before he could say a word Marty had shoved a letter across the desk at him. It had been from the Veterans Administration. The GI loan had been turned down.
    And that afternoon, driving home, when the same tire had gone flat a second time, half a block from the apartment, Scott had sat in the car shrieking with laughter, so hysterical that he’d fallen off his special seat, bounced off the regular one, and landed in a laughter-twitching heap on the floor boards.
    It was the way. Self-defense; a mechanism the brain devised to protect itself from detonation; a release when things became wound up too tightly.
    When he reached the carton, he climbed in, not even caring if the spider was waiting in there for him. He walked in long strides to the sewing box and found a small thimble. It took all the strength in him to push it up the hill of clothes and shove it out through the opening.
    He rolled the thimble across the floor like a giant empty hogshead, the pin stuck through his handkerchief robe and scraping behind him on the cement as he moved.
    At the heater he thought first of trying to lift the thimble to the top of the cement block, then realized it was much too heavy and pushed it up against the base of the block, where the torrent of water quickly filled it.
    The water was a little dirty, but that didn’t matter. He picked up palmfuls of it and washed his face. It was a luxury he’d not experienced for many months. He wished he could shave off his thick beard, too; that would really feel good. The pin? No, that wouldn’t work.
    He drank some of the water and made a face. Not too good. Well, it would cool. Now he wouldn’t have to climb all the way down to the pump.
    Straining, he managed to drag the thimble a little bit away from the waterfall and let the quivering surface still itself. Then, propping the pin against the side of the thimble, he shinnied up its slanting length to the lip. There, amidst the faint spray, he looked into the mirror-like water at his face.
    He grunted. Truly, it was remarkable. Small, yes, a particled fractionof its former self; yet still the same, line for line. The same green eyes, the same dark-brown