Stripped context

A real atrocity cited as a bare fact, with everything that produced it cut away: no occupation, no siege, no history, no one on the other side of it. Mentioned once, by a character the work trusts, and never answered. Unlike a villain it needs no one to be drawn at all - the event does the drawing, and the omission does the arguing. The tell is a bombing with no before: violence that begins the moment the sentence does, so the only available explanation is the people named in it.

3 titles carry this label · chronological