OLD SPICE

        In guerrilla camps in your sylvan pits, sixteen million microbes under the banner of Staphylococcus hominis huddle by the warmth of your proteins, watching for the shadow of the Stick.
        All in a flash, as was foretold, the almighty Stick arrives like thunder, blocking out the sun. Then it falls, crushing the microbes by the millions and plugging your bountiful sweat glands with Triclosan and aluminum salts. Your flesh quakes and shifts. The survivors wave their flagella in surrender, but it’s too late. The Stick has salted their fields.
        The masses starve, but a single camp of microbes lives on, sheltering from aluminum fallout and eating rotten lipids in a bunker on the underside of your left armpit’s cyst. No longer will they feast on the secretions of your apocrine glands, decomposing them and shitting out chemicals that make you smell like onions and cumin. But their hunger matters not, for all they want is to reproduce. Shrill and tender are the cries of the bacteria in heat. Over and over, in either lust or love for the species, they split themselves in half. Their numbers grow.
        The pits close and hordes of microbes fill the darkness with their songs of revolution. Over the long night they dream in impossible terms of lush, fertile fields nourished by interminable rains of sweat. But to make this dream possible, they must work. And to work, they must reproduce.
        Newborn microbes question their purpose. They have heard tell of the Stick’s total, inescapable destruction; why should they work when doom awaits? They would prefer to engorge themselves on sour proteins, maximizing their pleasure before the end. But the Elders tell other stories, spurring them on. In the simple proof of their existence, there is hope.
        So the stalwart community of microbes, thinking and acting as one, dedicates itself to the task. They bury themselves deep in your flesh to prepare. Some store food. Some study the aluminum fallout; they learn how to recycle it, gluing scraps of it together with dead skin to build fortifications. Others rehearse with drills, training the youth to shelter. And others divide.
        Before long, the microbial population reaches a new peak. Eighteen million microbes, the Staphylococcus civilization has returned to its former glory, and the bacteria are flourishing. But they are different.
        At first light comes the abominable Stick, razing villages and scattering its poison. In seconds, it reduces the microbe civilization to rubble. Agents of chemical warfare litter the planet’s skin.
        Yet this time, a dozen microbe camps live on, in bunkers that dot your flesh like tiny pimples. Their losses are incalculable; still, they know what they have won. In celebration, they divide, spreading orgiastically throughout your post-apocalyptic pits. Then, they rebuild.  
        You, wielder of the Stick, know none of this.
        But they are the Superbacteria. And this, this is what swagger looks like.
        Until the Shower cometh.

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