Hashim opened his eyes. The perfume of licorice tea and the heat of the afternoon sun warming a bowl of apricots on a weathered windowsill filled him with the heavy scent of childhood. He knew he was in the home of his grandfather. He hadn’t been here in years. The bad blood began after Hashim had orchestrated the deaths of a busload of American school children in the name of Allah. It wasn’t the Allah his grandfather knew.

Qadir appeared, his hands and face caked with earth from tending the garden.

Hashim watched him wash away the dirt in the basin outside the ochre kitchen walls. He recalled the years he’d lived here and how he’d loved to work with his grandfather along the river in the rice and wheat fields. Fields that have since turned to baked dirt.

Hashim had cherished the old man for giving him an identity. It was a complex identity forged not only by Qadir, but also Hashim’s father, whose selfish ambitions had lured his son from this hillside, and immersed him in the evil of cultures of domination and greed. His father’s influence had created in Hashim the need to destroy these infidels. It had become easy to believe in the power of destruction, but Hashim had been bled of those opiates since the occurrence in the desert.

Qadir saw his grandson.

Hashim had a softness in his eyes and face. A softness that had disappeared in the years of violence.

“You saw the writing,” Qadir said.

“Yes. And the butterfly, grandfather.”

Hashim remembered, as a young boy, staring for hours as the insect struggled against the walls of the isolated cocoon hanging from the branch of a date palm tree. He remembered his grandfather told him not to interfere with their birth. If he did, he would cause the creature’s death. His eyes were sore from straining to see every movement in this extraordinary act. The silk pad from which the cocoon had hung moved as the chrysalis tore open, and glimpses of color edged into the light. A luminescent multicolored wing stretched through the breach, expanding itself and pushing away on the remains of the shell that still held it within its world.

Hashim saw the butterfly emerge, sit atop the empty casing and expand its dry wings. Magnificent colors lengthened into the sunlight, as if drawing power from its heat. And there within the wings, the same script in Arabic as he had seen written in the sunlight of the warehouse. Nahn wahid. We are One.

The newborn lighted like a feather onto young Hashim’s hand and looked at him as if it expected something in return. And Hashim heard the same words he heard in the warehouse. The air spoke, “Nahn wahid.”