On sun-baked red clay, beside the serpentine trickle from the garden hose, the ants are making war. Little Noemi crouches, dirty-handed, scuffed and stained, and watches the red and black colonies do battle.

"I want them to stop fighting," she tells her friend.

*You could make that happen.*

Noemi scrunches up her brow in perturbed concentration. "They should all just go back to their hills and make things. There's plenty of room for all of them."

*If only. That's rarely the way of things, I've found.*

"Why do they hate each other?"

*Oh, child, if you knew how many times I've asked...*

Noemi fingers the halved husk of a dead ant. "It's a waste that he died. He could have gone back to his hill and made...made...a bowling alley out of caterpillar teeth."

*It's a she. And I don't know if caterpillars have teeth...*

After a moment's more thought, the girl stands, her face resolute. "They have to stop fighting. It's pointless. What do I do to stop it, Ken?"

*Who do you want to win?*

She frowns. "I want them both to win."

*That can't happen.*

Her lip trembles, perhaps with anger, perhaps with imminent tears. "Why?"

*It is the way of things. You must choose.*

"Well. that's not fair!" she snaps. "I like them both! The red ones and the black ones!"

*Noemi, this is something you must learn if you are to be like me: sometimes we must destroy in order to preserve.*

She stands there for a long while in silence. She does not cry. The sun crawls lower and draws her shadow across the line of the garden hose and the skirmishes of the ants, like a veil of powdered onyx.

"Noemi!" her mother calls from the house. "It's dinner! Your father made sashila!"

*The time to choose, then. I made this choice once. Yours will be harder than mine.*

"Noemi!"

"The red ants are my favorite," little Noemi says, and she lifts one foot. When she is done at the battlefield she follows the stream of black ants back to their hill, the garden hose trailing behind her and making little nooses in the grass.

The sashila is good, but over dinner, her parents cannot make her say one word.