Short Stories and poems

E. coli in the Water

The water I drink has a deadly disease, and I’m healthy?

I’m a real-life country boy. I’ve grown up on a farm, and I’m surrounded by plenty of farms with plenty of cattle. I go swimming and fishing in a creek not even a hundred feet from my place, and I have fun. I also drink plenty of good water from tap, or the spigot. I’m comfortable around bees and hornets, and I can deal with skunk spray. I wish I could say that I could hit a flea off of a squirrel’s backside with a .22 rifle from a hundred yards away, but I can’t hit a tin can from twenty feet.

The funny thing is, I’m immune to some deadly strains of Escherichia coli or E. coli as it is commonly called. How do I know this? Putting in a new house requires a whole lot of testing, including that of the water supply. Well someone took one look at our water and shouted, “We need to dump Chlorine in their water! They have a mess-load of E. coli!”

The thing is, I’ve been drinking, bathing, swimming, and cleaning cuts with this water for over ten years now. I’m immune to the bacteria, but lab guys don’t listen to country boys, and they know how to use the loopholes in the fine print. So someone came down here and there went the E. coli that my body was used to. Problem is, E. coli is a survivor, and I have this feeling that there is still E. coli in the water, and it is even more deadly than before.