Fecal Coliforms

I dried my hands hastily, snatching off more paper towels than I really needed. He'd made no effort at trying to conceal his impatience with my umpteenth visit to the restroom that day. I could imagine him waiting outside the public bathroom, pacing around with that brow furrow-look he always wore when he was irritated with me but not voicing it. I tossed the wad of paper towel into the rubbish bin before making my hasty exit. I reached out, grasped the handle, and yanked the door open before realizing I'd just grabbed it with my bare hand. I jerked my hand off the handle as though it was made of hot iron.

Shit, shit, shit!!!

I stood frozen in the doorway as the horror of all the people who did not Wash Hands Before Returning To Work washed over me, but it was too late. He'd already seen me and was unsubtly stabbing his index finger at an imaginary watch on his wrist. His brow furrowed furiously, mimicking perfectly the expression I'd just been imagining. It would've been comical if it weren't so utterly horrible.

I thought fast. Maybe I could tell him I'd forgotten to wash my hands? He didn't know that the whole bathroom mission was aimed at that very task, but it wouldn't matter- he'd know I was lying. I considered telling him about the grievous error I'd just made, but the furrow threatened to cleave his head in half, checking the words before they could reach my mouth.

"Why are you standing there?! Let's go," he urged obliviously. There was no help for it. I'd just have to go. By sheer force of will, I put one foot in front of the other, moving farther away from the one thing that could save me from raving madness: the soap.

'It's okay, you can do this,' I coached myself. I fought down the panic, and continued moving forward, a grim rictus that I hoped passed for a smile plastered across my face. I wiped my sweating palms on the front of my pants before taking his outstretched hand and proceeding toward our theater.

He was half-dragging me across the lobby, ranting quietly about how much he hates missing the previews and sitting on the ends of the rows, and I was desperately trying to focus on his displeasure to distract me from my mounting unease.

". . . don't sit RIGHT in the center of the row, you miss SO much. . ."

My palms began to tingle. I wrestled my attention back to my husband, forcing a look of conspiratorial resentment across my features and murmuring something like agreement.

"And if you sit too far forward OR backward. . . "

The tingle graduated to an outright itch.

". . . you miss the effect of the surround sound."

It was all I could do to keep from yanking my hand out of his and fleeing for the sanctuary of the sink. Mercifully, he released my captive hand to surrender our tickets. I pushed my hands into the front pocket of my hoodie and used the cover to scratch them a bit. I felt somewhat relieved.

He carried on with his rant, unaware of my fretful inattention. I could practically feel the bacteria burrowing into my skin, breeding and spreading their pyrogens. They appeared in my mind as the wormy-looking creatures depicted on telephones and light switches in Lysol commercials. The wormies squiggled and crawled across the surface of my hands, etching the words Fecal Coliforms in neon green microscopic lettering into my flesh.

I shuddered at those words. Fecal coliforms. Ass-germs.

The itching, crawling feeling in my hands was reaching a fever pitch as we stumbled and apologized our way over peoples laps and belongings, zeroing in on our destination- the center of the row (neither too far forward nor too far back). I completely dropped any pretense of paying attention at this point and focused on clawing at my hands. I fantasized about inundating the nasty, wriggling wormies under the purifying faucet; of conflagrating them with the scalding water. Dreams of this boiling baptism and the devastation it would visit upon the coliforms filled me with such longing that I missed one woman's foot and pitched forward onto the floor.

I didn't feel my head banging on the chair next to me, nor my shin banging on the arm rest of another seat. I didn't feel my teeth sink into my lip nor the sting of my bruised pride. What I felt was my hands pressing down into the soda-sticky, food-littered, gum-stuck seething mass of germ-procreation that was the theater floor. I stifled a scream that the concerned onlookers took for a grunt of pain, and they helped me up. My hands felt like they were being devoured from the inside out.

"Your lip is bleeding, honey," my husband worried at me, "are you alright?"

I smiled shakily at him.

"I'm fine. I'm just gonna go wash my face and get myself together."

He nodded sympathetically, and I hurried off to pursue my long-awaited ablutions.


This is my entry for Mrs. C's blogging challenge, topic 6: Obsessed