The fiction writer's creative engagement with the material of armed, organized conflict to convey the reality of the unreal and abnormal traces of war invites a wide poetic and aesthetic response. After a decade dominated by literature about the memory of war producing uncanny responses to the historical moment as the past unsettled the present, literature of the 1990s added a new layer of unease in a second dislocation of the historical continuum as the known world of Serbia as part of Yugoslavia was wrenched apart. Old ghosts and new spectres met in another era of social violence. The short story Bomba by Vladimir Pitalo focuses on the effects of war on the young narrator and his two friends Rakun and Buratino. Narrative fiction constructs order and suggests meaning in its sequence of events on the assumption that what happens later has been caused to happen by prior actions.