'In the field' by Simon Lee-Price

Nobody asked him what had happened in the war. Only the girl seemed to understand. He watched her from his car. She played in the garden with her dolls, dressing them, combing their hair. Stiff and silent, the dolls never resisted her, not even when she pulled off all their clothes. He watched how she laid them in the grass, how she stood up smiling and brushed the debris from her floral dress. He watched her skip away toward the house. His gaze returned to the dolls, to the tiny corpses she’d left to burn in the blinding afternoon sun.