Covie was born ready to do good.  He was born into a group of 472,987 fellow particles, and flew out of the dark, stinky cave of a man’s throat into the bright sunlight, feeling ready to tackle life. Soon after though, Covie started to hear murmurs from the group about their lives’ purpose, and became confused and distraught; we’re supposed to go into another human and… try to kill them? Another Covid-19 particle came up to him as he started to float away from the swarm and broke things down for him.

               “Dude, we need to survive until we can get sniffed or breathed back in and then kick some immune system ass! We can get in through their noses, their mouths, even their eyes or ears! Really any hole on a human. Then once enough of us are in there, they start to get sooo sick, it’s hilarious. Then we just make more of ourselves, eventually change into new strains, and the cycle continues. The humans have really gone ape shit since we’ve left those bats and started getting at it with them. Haha! C’mon Covie, I promise it’ll be rad!”

               “No!” Covie shouted, “I don’t want to do that, I want to explore the world and do some good! I’m going off on my own!”

               Covie floated away and landed on a nearby humans’ sweatshirt sleeve and grabbed on for dear life. The human clearly didn’t want to get infected, as she had a mask on and was speed walking with her head down, dodging other humans that came her way. “Perfect,” Covie thought, “I’ll hang out with her, stay away from her human holes, and learn about how I can be brave and safe and do some good!”

               The human ran up some stairs, into a boring looking building and into a really small box that was swarming with other particles that were chanting and cheering each other on.

“Get under her mask, haha! Look at that flimsy shit!” one shouted.

“Get to the hands, get to the hands!” screamed another as he dove down in the air.

“Stop it guys! She clearly doesn’t want us in her body! Leave her alone!” Covie cried out.

“Shut up, lame-ass. You can’t ignore your lifes’ purpose. Infect! Infect! Reproduce! Infect!”

Covie receded into the threads of the sweatshirt as the tiny box’s doors closed and hoped that the particles would fail at their mission. The box started going upwards, and the other particles swam faster around in the air.

               Once the box finally stopped and the doors opened, the human got out and speed-walked to another door, and when she went in, Covie saw that they were in another small box. Luckily this time there weren’t many other particles around, and they were mostly on the ground lying around a bunch of confusing looking papers and food wrappers. Phew, she probably won’t get infected here!

               Covie jumped off and landed on the ground, thinking that it would be a safe bet for now to avoid accidently infecting the human.  But he turned out to be wrong because she very quickly threw off her backpack and laid face down on the floor. Covie got stuck on her cheek, nervous that he could accidently slip into one of her human holes, but was finally pushed off about 5 minutes later when she wiped her tears away and dragged herself to the couch. She turned on the TV and put on a show where people were sitting around in an office. Covie jumped onto the couch next to her and was at first confused about why she would want to watch this, but then understood once he saw a stapler be put into jell-0. They watched together for 7 hours straight.

               “Psst” Covie heard, breaking him out of his binge-stupor. “Psst, down here”. Covie looked down to the ground that was swarming with many dying particles and jumped down to the one talking.

“Help us out! Let’s team up and come up with a plan!” cried the particle.

“No! I do not want to join your cult, leave us alone!”

“You really don’t want to infect her?” he asked while coughing and wobbling around.

“No, I don’t! I want to do good in this life! But.. am I running out of time? You guys look sick.”

“You really want to stay alive even if you can’t infect? Huh… well then, get on some cardboard. I heard a rumor that you can live for up to a whole day on that shit.”

           “Cool!” Covie looked around and saw a brown box with a black Amazon strip across it. He jumped over and hung out on it, plotting and planning how he could do some good, until the human came over and tore at the box to get her new iPad charger and bags of bulk candy. Afterwards, she grabbed the box, left the room and tossed what was left of it into a nearby trashcan while Covie held on for dear life. He tried not to cry about his sudden break from this human he felt he bonded with over that bizarrely genius show.

“I’ll be okay though, I’ve lived a good life so far… here I go onto the next stage of my adventure!” he said to himself before he saw the other particles angrily sitting around in the trash can with him.

To be continued…