Regrettable Champion

One cell, the ultimate lost cause. Straddling the line between life and death, suffering eternally an existence hedged between realities. Boots marched over the cell, clinging unknowingly to a dead branch frozen stiff in the ice. In spring, it clung still to the melting rot, determined without awareness to survive. A simple goal, yet inconceivable, for what evil forces have kept it down so far would l only grow more vigilant when the cell made itself known.

One ordinary spring day, a mut stopped by that puddle for a quick drink before continuing on its way, taking with him that cell on his journey through the streets. The cell awoke to a dark, moist confusion filled with the dank scent of unkempt canine breath. Threaded still between the boundaries of life and death, the cell picked itself up to try yet again.

It burrowed into a home inside the tissue of the dog’s gums and lived there unassumingly. That is until a bristled monster thrust the cell back and forth until agitating the it from within its house of flesh and forced it flinging into the air. It landed this time inside the moist fluid of a young girl’s eye. Determined again to make a home to just live, the cell wriggled itself onto an eyelash to make a new house.

Helpless to keep the residence that he loves, the cell is washed away when tears fall over a broken toy. The cell falls onto the cold plastic of a Barbie’s thigh, and reverts back to the other side of the fence, doomed to live in the realm of death until chance returns to revive him.

Seven years pass while he lay helpless and dead on the inside of an unused box on the top shelf of a closet. A garage sale is what revitalizes that invisible cell; when the gentle hand of an elderly man raises the barbie and makes the purchase as a gift for his grandchild. The youngster will not be the only one cheered up by this gesture, for the cell has been shocked back to life, and scrambles desperately into a lesion on the senior’s hand.

This time, the cell thinks to itself, I will make a permanent home. I have been tossed around for time untold, never able to find a permanence. Why am I discarded? Does my size make me worthless? Perhaps it was the right call, for when his home was set up on the torn skin of that man’s hand, the cell decided to populate the home he had made.

The yellow, infected puss of the cell’s strength grew evermore. Now, when the elderly man went to scrub away the cell’s walls and roof, it clings tightly to the certainty and life of the flesh. Each time it receives an eviction notice, the cell populated the house with ever-growing tenants of ooze and puss, living beneath their protection.

One day, a well fortified army of anti-microbial fighters sloughed off on the skin cell roof of the its home. Too long have I been dismissed and rejected, the cell thought to itself, passion growing it evermore until a necrotic army of death under that cell's command had overtaken the hand. Determined to no longer straddle the line, the cell thought to himself that the land of the hand was not possibly enough to ensure his safety in the land of the living.

It was time for the crusade. With fervorous desperation, the cell hopped from place to place, populating and abandoning, ensuring a home in spite of the billions of critters that arrive each minute to fight it back to the realm of silence and death. The homes it abandoned to his mindless cellular army decay into a permanent organic death, known not to the cell, only to the host.

Yet the cell was not concerned, he is just one, weak against the army of many, fighting with the righteousness of individual tenacity. The cell carried this flag in the battles against the Goliath ; the trillions of armies of immune systems, medications, and sanitizing agents determined to doom the cell.

The fight for the underdog, the cell is sure, is an honorable one. The numbers swell against the cell, and each time it is more and more determined to not be marginalized due only to size. The cell travels and grows as the truest underdog: unwanted, unloved, and somehow undefeated.

And when finally, after the last of the battles are won, and the enemies of the simple cell's immortality lay in piles by the decrepid billions, victory reigns as no dissent remains to fight. The cell declares itself a winner against unthinkable odds. Yet no one remains to cheer. No organic matter remains to allow the cell to straddle the fence on the side of life. And so it returns to the realm of the dead, to lie in wait until the next chance to show the world the power of one.