There’s a constant, quiet fump fump fump coming from the space where my muscles fold into my flesh. I feel it along my arms and chest, underneath my cheeks. The pattering wraps around my thighs and crawls across my stomach. It’s desynchronized; it’s chaotic. It makes my skin feel as though it’s stretched just too tightly across my insides. And the fump fump fump speeds up. My skin is like tissue paper, and as the rhythm reaches a frenzied pitch, it begins to tear from within. Out of my forearm appears the slimmest, black appendage. It slips through like a straw through the lid of a cup. I lift the hem of my shirt and a fissure alongside my navel reveals a single wing beating frantically. Panic twists like ivy towards my throat as more splits open in my skin and the existing tears grow wider, but more than that - I am alive. I take one last great gasp of air, reveling in that feeling of life - that electricity that sparks its way through every cell in my body – and my skin loses the last of its papery integrity and ten thousand butterflies hurl themselves out into the world. Each wing is unfurled completely and the fump fump fump is now a chorus of twenty thousand delicate membranes embracing freedom. The insects push at their new boundaries and fly, scattered, to the long lost corners of the universe. And as the last spark flutters away from the epicenter, that place where I once had a body finally finds the silence. The stillness. And where I once had eyes, I close them. When they open once more, I am bathed in the sun. I am stretched across a leaf. I am fanning my wings.