[3] As the Bosnian War rages on, a young woman called Aida sends letters describing her experiences throughout the conflict as she, as a video editor for foreign news outlets, maintains an in-depth view of the events.
Once the narrator's interjection passes, the focus returns to Aida, who mentions her aunt Fatima's death due to a medicine shortage as the asthma medication she depended on could not reach her, leading to her suffocation.
Kevin echoes her sentiment that the goriest, more compelling events filmed will never be broadcast, as she had experienced a similar sort of censorship when editing footage for foreign networks.
Aida's letters resume, as she speaks of growing closer to Kevin due to his detachment from the environments he filmed in, and the relatability of his stories to her own experiences.
She then describes the television studio she sleeps in, a large, dark room filled with cameras that act as tripping hazards, where electricity is produced by a gasoline-powered generator.
This is why he pursues such shallow, past topics for his letters, admitting to the fact that it acts as a mechanism of cowardice to make him feel like his and Aida's lives occur in tandem.
Aida's aunt began to produce a stench so pungent and inescapable that once perfumes stopped masking it, they dumped her out of a window during a time between shelling sessions.
Upon seeing images of destroyed buildings in Sarajevo shown to him by a friend who asked him if he could identify the architecture, the narrator begins to see them as empty, being unable to recognize any.
Aida outlines the experience of sprinting through a sniper-covered zone, then mentioning the picture she sent the narrator depicting herself in front of a library in a bulletproof vest.
the purchase of said vest became one of her happiest recent memories, as it would make it harder for snipers to kill her; they would need to hit a clean shot to her head, as her body would be protected.
In her 2021 analysis of the story, Una Tanović argued that, from a standpoint regarding dialogue, "A Coin"'s nature as a collection of letters undermines ease of access and understanding, rather serving to exhibit the difficulties of communication between those forced to leave a country and those who remain within it.
She wrote:I argue that by undermining the dialogic writing that is a basic generic epistolary convention, […] Hemon highlight[s] the impassibility of some national borders to some bodies.
Instead of privileging the ideals of dialogue, communication, and human connection, the letters in these stories subvert them, thus cautioning against ignoring asymmetries of power in situations of forced migration and not allowing for a simplistic celebration of mobility in an age of supposedly unparalleled border-crossings.
[6] José Ibáñez, from another perspective, claimed the story produces a critique of modern American literature by awakening the voice of a "submerged population", acting as a vocal source for the subaltern.