My name is Spike.
I am very, very small. Smaller than a crumb. Smaller than a speck. Smaller than the tiny dot at the end of this sentence.
I am a germ.
And I am having the BEST day.
Right now I'm riding on a hand. A perfect, beautiful, sticky hand. It belongs to a kid named Marcus, and Marcus has been busy.
First he pet a dog. Then he dug in the dirt. Then he picked up a worm — a WORM! — and I hopped right on. From the worm to his thumb. Easy.
Now there are hundreds of us on this hand. My friends are here. Grizelda is tucked under a fingernail. Bloop is hiding in a knuckle crack. We're all hanging on, happy as can be.
"This," I say to Grizelda, "is the life."
The hand is warm. The hand is a little bit sweaty. There are tiny bits of peanut butter between the fingers.
I love peanut butter.
Marcus goes inside for lunch. His hand reaches for a sandwich. YES! A sandwich! If I can get on that sandwich and into that belly, I could make Marcus feel really, really yucky.
I stretch out my tiny spike arms. I'm SO close.
Then a voice says, "Marcus, go wash your hands."
No.
No no no.
"But they're not even dirty!" says Marcus.
THAT'S RIGHT, MARCUS. THEY'RE FINE. THEY'RE BEAUTIFUL.
"Go," says the voice.
Marcus pushes back his chair. His hand swings through the air. We all hold on tight. Grizelda grabs my arm. Bloop squeezes his eyes shut.
I can hear it before I see it.
Water. Running water.
The hand goes under the faucet, and the water hits us like a river. A warm, rushing, terrible river. Some germs slide right off. Just — whoooosh — gone. I dig in. I hold on with all my spikes.
"HA!" I yell. "You can't get ME with just water! I am SPIKE! I am STRONG! I am—"
Then I see it.
The soap.
It's green. It's goopy. Marcus pumps it once and a big shiny blob lands right in his palm.
"Oh no," whispers Grizelda.
Here's the thing about soap. Soap doesn't just push you. Soap grabs you. It gets under you and around you and pulls you right off the skin. You can't hold on. You CAN'T.
Marcus rubs his hands together. Bubbles everywhere. Big ones, little ones, bubbles between the fingers, bubbles over the knuckles, bubbles around the thumbs. Everything is slippery and foamy and HORRIBLE.
"HOLD ON!" I scream.
But Grizelda is gone. Swept away in a bubble.
Bloop is gone. Spinning down the drain.
The bubbles are coming for me. I feel them under my spikes. One arm slips. Then another.
"NOOOOOOO—"
Whoooosh.
I slide off the hand, into the foam, down through the drain, into the dark.
Gone. All of us. Gone.
The hand is clean now. I know because I'm not on it anymore. Marcus dries it on a towel. He goes back to the table. He picks up his sandwich with clean, warm fingers.
And me? I'm down here in the pipes. Grizelda found me. Bloop floated by a second ago.
It's wet. It's cold. There is no peanut butter.
I'll be honest with you. I'm not happy about the soap. Not one bit.
But up there? Marcus is eating his sandwich. His belly is germ-free. He feels good. He feels fine.
He probably doesn't even think about me.
And tonight, when he brushes his teeth and crawls into bed, he won't know that somewhere far away, a very small germ named Spike is shaking his tiny fist at a blob of soap.
But now YOU know.
So when someone says, "Go wash your hands" — you know exactly why.
Because soap washes germs like me away.
And we really, really don't like it.
