The wet snow buried the faces of the fallen, upon the frozen river of blood. He stepped across the delta, stopped in time, gazed beyond the roofless structure, at the raped firmament. The man was— is scarless. Muffled gunfire and screams echoed throughout the unplanned planetarium from the roundabout parallel. He tucked his dog tag underneath his uniform, it was cold to the touch of his fingers, but colder to the chest. Metal beads burned his chest. Even with the lash of the squint, every rod and cone struggled to see fidelity or color, if one doesn't count black, grey, or red as colors. There, an obelisk in the mist or fog, he laid eyes upon an MP-40 magazine on the pavement. It stood upright tucked in the membrane of the snow, saluting. The white blood cells in his index finger waved a white flag to the winter. Footsteps. They didn't belong to him. From there, a cry whose origin was not of the trachea, but from the little mouths of every tooth, so deafening, yet comforting. Comfort, the eighth deadly sin.

He reached for the magazine, grasped it, and looked inside the cartridge. Three pages. Before he heard the breath of his neighbor, he was stung by the wraith of the accuser. His cochlea sung a song of the highest note, and time stopped again. The pain from the sound of the shot temporarily masked the pain of the wound. His streak of scarlessness was stolen by the sap of dim scarlet. The man whose feet didn't belong to him squeezed his index finger on the trigger. Click. All of the pages have been ripped out. The man retracted his palm off of the wound, and equipped his submachine gun. He limped towards a pile of rubble, and fired all three rounds at the man charging with a barrel of a Luger in his hand. The man’s yearly magazine subscription was up.

The man kept charging towards him, at a heavy pace. Lying down, he placed the warm bolt of the MP-40 on his wound. The frozen blood of the body next to him boiled in envy. The man found him getting up, and swung the handle of the pistol as quick as his service. He didn't have to dodge it, but he couldn't ignore it. However, he saw that one of the pages hit. The Christmas special was in the abdomen. He dropped the MP-40 on the snow as a distraction and smote him, directly in the most wonderful time of the year. The man retaliated with a strike on his sciatic tendon, where he shot him. They painted the white snow an unfruitful crimson after every strike. And the knuckles of the lazy clouds laid witness to their struggle, shrugged, and rubbed their fingers together to bury the two bodies with a sprinkle of snow. For behold, the firmament was still desecrated.