Collateral Skull refers specifically to the wording of the American government regarding its drone strikes in the Middle East, highlighting the civilian victims of political and societal arbitrariness. The victims emerge as initially vague outlines in shifting daily news, sometimes stemming from personal memory, other times from a collective historical consciousness. The narrative voice addresses the absurdity of its own daily life in light of its worldly knowledge. It attempts to articulate the incompatibility of what is happening simultaneously here and there into a conceptual - and thus linguistic - form. The narrator strives for identification with the anonymous victims, giving them names and testing the limits of their empathy, falling into radical self-doubt, seeking comfort without wanting to relinquish the brutal honesty regarding their own shame. From the tension of moral claims, media cynicism, and everyday needs arises the darkly ironic and melancholic tone of the text, its associative inserts of news flashes, flashbacks, and fragmented thoughts, as well as the immediate orality as an expression of a shared suffering that has resolved not to become desensitized.