Victims.

• Author: Thiriot, Louella
• Position: Short story

VICTIMS.

Frannie watched listlessly while her father killed the bunnies. It was hot, and the heat held her like a glove. The featureless flat concrete of the air base stretched forever. There was no grass or trees. In the enlisted personnel zone where they lived, even the backyards of the houses were concrete. Before Frannie's mother disappeared she had complained about the concrete, but nothing was ever done. So she bought the bunnies and put them in a cage decorated with photographs of grass. To bring life to this lifeless place of destruction and death, she had said. Everybody laughed.

That was all the little girl could remember of her mother, a loving, peaceful woman who cooked french fries every night and always made extra to pack with sandwiches. Now, on the anniversary of the disappearance, Frannie's father was taking the bunnies out one by one and killing them. He was using a device stolen from the survival kit of an FB111. Smooth and gleaming, the device had been developed by a secret agency, far more secret than the CIA, so that pilots could kill bunnies for food after dropping the nuclear bomb, when they returned to a country that didn't exist anymore. Each time her father put a bunny into the device, he had to adjust dozens of dials and shield his eyes. These dials were finely made in a huge factory in North Carolina, although all identifying marks had been carefully filed off. The device made no sound. It had been designed that way at great expense. Frannie felt no emotion as she watched.

The next day men with guns came to arrest her father for stealing the device. It was the last Frannie would see of him, although years later she got a postcard showing a beach somewhere. The beach looked hot and flat. Nothing could live on it. Fish came there to die and men and women, to get skin cancer. Anyway, it hardly mattered, since the postcard was not from him.

When the men pounded on the door, Frannie's father refused to come out. He hid Frannie in a clothing hamper and she heard his voice, electric with rage even though he felt nothing. The rage flowed into him from some other place, some place of horror. People said Frannie's father had been a kind man who always donated money to the Jerry Lewis telethon. But the war changed him. He refused to talk about the war, even to say which war it had been.

Once, watching a game show on their cheap television in the dreary barracks, he had suddenly grabbed Frannie and shouted, "You don't know! You weren't on the mission!' Soldiers were marching by outside but none of them seemed to hear.

Just as quickly, the fury released him. Returning his attention to the game show, her father seemed to forget his own existence. He was able to predict whether the blond, the brunette, or...