The Fourteenth Cookie

3 - The cookie effect

It was a truly beautiful late-summer evening. An evening such as that one was not one to be wasted. The best place to enjoy it at its fullest was on a beach, next to the sea with the only thing anyone could hear being the harmonious melody of the waves slowly crashing onto the seashore. This was exactly what was thinking a small blue and black butterfly that after a little effort, fighting the light breeze, landed on a massive sea-side straw beach umbrella. She had brought with her only a small bottle of her favorite nectar drink, an exotic mix of strawberry and water melon.

She gazed gleefully at the setting sun, sipping occasionally at the nectar, her pretty eyelids and eyelashes slowly fluttering every once in a while, her minuscule antennae moving slightly in ever-changing directions because of the wind. She was feeling happy. At a totally unexpected moment, she flapped her wings lightly. It was nothing more than a trivial reflex, caused by something undefined, a subconscious reaction to something unknown. That involuntary hardly noticeable shudder of her body amused her, it made her smile. Just as a little smile begun forming in her cute face, she looked back and saw a little boy and a cookie approaching the beach, then starting to move beach chairs around, dusting-them-off and finally settling-down under the umbrella next to hers.

She was most definitely not expecting to see that. It was in fact the very last thing she had anticipated witnessing that evening. The boy and the cookie were sitting next to each other, talking. They were smiling at each other, laughing at each other's jokes, having fun, it seemed. The little butterfly could not hear properly the conversation, but she was paying close attention to their reactions, their gestures, their interaction. They appeared relaxed and at ease with one another. They were perhaps close friends or old friends or something of that nature. They seemed to be having a nice time and both gave the impression that there was nowhere else they'd rather be, at that very moment.

The cookie and the little boy were lying on beach chairs in close proximity to each other, but with a clearly defined space between them nonetheless. The butterfly decided to attempt to move a little closer to them. She was truly curious about what was going on with those two and wanted to know what they were talking about. She first made a totally failed attempt to take-off from her umbrella but the wind was becoming too strong. She then tried to walk down the umbrella's support pole but its surface proved too slippery. She finally attempted a small jump from the edge of her umbrella, but she nearly lost her footing, practically falling-off completely.

She was about to try out yet another idea of hers to get closer to them when she turned instinctively her little head to the left and looked at the cookie and the boy. The cookie was saying something and the little boy was listening whilst looking at the cookie intensely. Both of them had a very serious allure about them. All of a sudden, the butterfly noticed what looked like a very thin silk string moving through the air, from the body of the cookie and attaching itself on the body of the boy! The string was transparent, almost invisible, but the butterfly was sure she was seeing right. She was trying to focus on the string, when another silky-like string came out of the cookie's body, moved through the air and attached itself to the boy's body once again. The butterfly could not believe her little, miniature, eyes. Soon, there were hundreds of small strings between their two bodies, linking them, connecting them. There was virtually no empty space left between the cookie and the small boy by that point, but those two were completely and utterly oblivious to this, they hadn't even noticed it. It was as if they were communicating with their words and their gestures and their body movements and at the same time, they were also exchanging information about themselves via these silk-string connectors, these countless, barely visible, exceptionally frail-looking, information-connecting-cables.

The butterfly had never witnessed such a thing before in her life, was totally stunned and felt truly mesmerized by the experience. As she was trying to gain a better understanding of the situation, to get a clearer grasp on what was going on, a thought came to her mind. She realized that it was the cookie who was the initiator of all this. The boy was there, capable only of reacting to the situation without having any sort of control over the process. The cookie was solely responsible for what was happening. The little boy was simply taking in what was happening, accepting all these quasi-invisible connectors being attached to his body without acting in response. He was under her spell, being subjected to the very deep and strange effect the cookie had on him.