You punch the button.

Ding.

The room is back to its original boring colors. And so are you. And so are the butterflies that now fill the room.

Butterflies are small, so they’re hard to count, but if I had to guess I’d say there are approximately a hundred and eighty-six of them in here.

Sure I could have typed out that number in numericals, but I get paid by the word here, so every little bit helps. I’m sure you’re absolutely not surprised to learn that I’m worried about my word count.

Want to hear a detailed account of how butterflies are technically caterpillar zombies?!?!

I’m kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you.

Or would I?

I wouldn’t. Anyways, the butterflies mostly seem to be smallish yellow ones with brown dots. There are some medium-sized orange ones with black dots, too.

There might be a few moths in the mix, but it’s hard to say. They are very similar, after all.

They flutter about, landing on the walls, ceiling, and you. Mostly you. To be fair, to a butterfly you’re the most interesting thing in the room.

It starts off kind of cool. I mean, how often do you get to have a bunch of butterflies land on you?

Yeah yeah, stop bragging.

They gently land on your body, kissing you with their proboscises. Proboscii. Their mouth straw things.

It tickles.

And then more of them land on you.

And then more.

They start walking around, and it becomes less cool. Especially the dozen or so wandering around in your hair. Unless you’re bald, in which case they’re wandering around on top of your head.

There are a lot of nerve endings on the top of your head. This feels really weird.

One adventurous butterfly tries to crawl up your nose!

This is quite uncomfortable. You whack at it, trying to blow it out of your nose, and a wing gets caught in your mouth.

Butterfly wings taste quite terrible. They’re covered in tiny scales that come off like dust, and feel slightly oily for some reason. They’re mostly there to refract light and make the butterflies look pretty, but when one gets into your mouth usually you don’t care how pretty it looks because it tastes nasty.

Hopefully you didn’t bite down, because I can’t imagine that’d taste good at all. I can’t imagine that anything with green blood would taste very good.

Not raw, at least.

Or cooked, for that matter.

Maybe you could roast a few, and see what they taste like!

...Oh right, you don’t have anything to cook with. So much for that idea.

What were we talking about? Right, the butterfly in your mouth!

Or rather, the butterfly that you just spit out of your mouth, that’s now limping in circles on the ground, wondering what deity it pissed off to deserve this fate.

Well, its miserable existence is about to come to an end. There are four butterflies closely examining the back of your neck, which is probably why you feel the need to scream.

Why don’t you go ahead and push the button, I’m sure whatever comes next can’t possibly be as bad as this…

DO YOU PUSH THE BUTTON? Yes No