My name is A.P. I live in S. and we are at war. When it first started, many suspected that it would end within a few days. Days, however, became weeks, then months, and eventually years. The siege alone lasted one thousand four hundred and twenty five days. One thousand four hundred and twenty five days, in which the constancy of destruction achieved a pleasurable degree of change independent of the weather, the seasons, or the varied intensity of plant life growing from a sea of brick uteri revealed by shelling. Lords of destruction, seated high in the hills strung out on local plum juice with excessive sugar content, reconfigured the city from their newly founded backwoods Helheim. With extensive beards knitted to the crowns of the sempervirent forest, now resembling fluffy black clouds bathed in the dry blood red of onsetting twilight, they became one with their surroundings. Unable to move, they pelted indiscriminately at the city below.

Light 120-millimeter projectiles fired from a mortar station huddle together momentarily, forming a controlled and unified soundscape along a prescribed trajectory. Before dispersing into bits of a dry-stacked wall that began to sag slowly like the body of a man shot while running from a sniper, they leave each other screaming and shouting. Meanwhile, the sound of a modified Mauser rifle, drilled and tapped for telescopic sights and mounts, suggests a few dead bodies and a deep puddle of quickly thickening and viscous magenta that complements the white and light blue of the UNPROFOR APC beautifully. Larger calibers differ. The thunder-roll that follows the death shells escaping the main gun of a dug-in M-84 tank often causes general mayhem. And excitement. With every roar, the city is further transformed. Houses become shapeless clouds of shrapnel, dust, and skeletal matter. Mounds are formed. Large bathing pools appear in the midst of four-lane roads. But, how real does the moment appear in which Tinker Bell—a cluster bomb—ends its calculated path?

Levitating with ease, as if truly sowing fairy dust across the Earth, the moment of its grounding stops time. Caught at the market, with heads frozen skyward, bodies of men, women, and children stand motionless. Sunrays shimmer through translucent fiberglass canopies mounted on top of space frames painted orange. Dandelion seed heads drift slowly following the air currents flowing between structures that surround the market. Their large windows, with bits of shattered glass resembling incomplete senior citizen denture sets, ooze clouds of musky air turned yellow. Everything is still. Quiet. A sense of serenity replaces the indistinct chatter of women trading the last unconsumed items of their dust-covered pantry. Silence. Light buzzing. The explosion that follows seems natural. A logical step toward the evolution of the city. The atmosphere changes. Thick air, spewed aggressively from many gaping orifices enveloping the market, is pierced by the approaching ambulance sirens. Shout. Scream. Call out. Howl. Permanent state of tinnitus sets in. The reverberation of the penetrating noise is echoed in the yawning chest of a man blown open by a bomblet, his corpse folded over a street railing. The hole created does not seem in the least unnatural. Peering into it lends an impression of viewing a sound-body very familiar. Yet, now, it is quiet as well.

As if in the last chapter of the unending struggle against the dual nature of our blasphemous lives, blood waves roll slowly, inching like pomegranate syrup from a shattered bottle on a white kitchen floor. From the wave’s glossy surface, the undead emerge lifting their arms and begging for mercy in a language unknown. Others remain prostrated face down with eyes open. Unlike bodies buried, these do not seem to petrify as to resemble a finely worked bronze, but rather gradually soften like massive ice cream chunks having landed on glowing tarmacadam. Clothing shreds, soaking up the warm fluid at high noon on a scorching summer day, pattern the sun-bleached sidewalk. A white Yugo halts curbside. Its exterior pierced by bullets, the shell resembles a low-tech projectile recognition system. All the while, three men are seated inside. A sign taped to the rear window reads: “Selling. In driving condition.” Behind it, an anxious-looking grandpa in his seventies is seated, bent slightly forward. In front of him, a bold man wearing a white shirt and a mean countenance peers out to check on the carnage beyond the seemingly protected domain of the vehicle. The driver is a tall dark man with a long head and bluishly purple circles around his eyes. Quietly observant and with a sense of ominous awe, he examines the present landscape systematically. At each instance of death, his mind places a body in a small green abode. A massive field appears.

The driver’s mind pieces together the new necropolis slowly, as cemeteries soar up propelled by the buoyant capacity of the increasing number of bodies interred. Like deaf flash mobs at bars attempting to restructure the dynamics of big city meat markets, headstones pierce the earth’s surface at night in tranquil unison sometimes occupying a football field, a city park, or a children’s playground. Drenched in thick cold sweat brought on by the paranoia of being shot by snipers lurking in towers beyond, gravediggers, followed by a funeral procession, rise from the shielding darkness of a midnight burial. Unconscious of their impact, they shuffle away quickly leaving the impromptu cemetery strangely ordered in the ruling chaos of terror. The hallucination-inducing uniformity of the remaining white pillars likens the site to a wild plant colony on a floating meadow, a series of tightly bunched crystalline formations on a never-ending plane of an obsidian mirror. And so, the dead tumble into the life of the living, to these new regions where moss will soon grow over scars and vegetative life will sprout from fleshy vessels below.

The story goes that a woman went blind during the first week of the war as a result of an attack. A heavyweight matriarch, she had thrived on a steady diet of cigarettes, coffee, and yelling at her daughter-in-law. Yet, having lost her sight, she became helpless. Unable to direct, control, or overview the Swiss clockwork mechanism of the household she had created, she presided over the wartime ménage from her divan in absolute silence, smoking endlessly. Small yellowish ash mounds formed on all sides, encircling the silent imposing figure. To stop the ashes from spilling across the tightly configured quarters, the young woman caring for the matriarch asked a blacksmith to forge a rather large ashtray. Yet, each day the ashtray proved too small and infinitesimal particles descended swiftly on the room like an avalanche of words unspoken and too voluminous for the room to bear. And each day the blacksmith returned to extend the lead-grey gift until it left the matriarch as the sole inhabitant of the room, locked in by phrases turned dead, awaiting her sentence. Surrounded by the heavily beaten sheet-metal and defying all attempts to embark on a journey to the other side of the apartment, the old woman died, leaving behind a space of mere fiction in which, as in the rest of the city, only death was real and life nothing but a series of eerie coincidences.

Almin Pršić received his Bachelor of Architecture/Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Architecture II (with Distinction) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Most recently, he has worked in the offices of Barkow Leibinger Architects and Reese Lubic Woehrlin in Berlin, where he focused on high-end residential projects, in addition to having led competitions and large-scale industrial projects. Currently, funded through Harvard University, he is pursuing a line of research focusing on the Bosna River basin in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which delves into questions of landscape, monumentality, and post-war development.