Azzam: The Butterfly Effect

Azzam is not yet twelve, but he already knows everything about the pain of loss. His father died three years ago in a sudden accident, and since that day the spiral of grief has only widened around him.

Now, on the edge of adolescence, the wound cuts deeper than before. He wonders whether the rest of his family feels the same bitterness — because their lives, as far as he can see, are carrying on while his has stopped.

He begins to run from his own thoughts, withdrawing into his iPad and social apps as an escape from his fears. It becomes a chosen isolation that pins his eyes and his mind inside the frame of a white screen… so he can forget.

Events accelerate when Azzam travels with his mother and his uncle on the last day of school to the family's home region in Asir, where he retreats into himself among his large extended family — a deeper loneliness, because everything there reminds him of his father.

Azzam's father had found himself in butterflies since childhood, as though they were the metaphorical world that opened his eyes to his own generous nature.

The inciting incident that carries Azzam into the butterfly world is an accident whose details he never grasps: a temporary coma after an ice-cream van strikes him, in a strange turn of events.

And if we look back, that same ice-cream van appears at the opening of the story — Azzam sees its driver emerging from the fog, grieving, stricken, alone… as if he belongs to another world.