1. Ice


    Date: 12/22/2015, Categories: Love Stories, Author: sprite, Rating: 71, Source: LushStories

    Stalingrad, December 25, 1942. Winter blankets everything, turning the landscape bizarrely beautiful. If you look carefully, you can make out shapes under the hoarfrost and snow. Burned out tanks and piles of brick and steel that were once buildings litter the frozen battlefield that was once home to over 400,000 Russian men, women, and children. Now the corpses outnumber the living. You can see them as well, frozen limbs reaching out from under the serenity of freshly fallen snowflakes. Ice clings to them, turning them into a landscape of crystalline beauty that is all the more horrible for it. All this I see through the scope of my rifle as I scan the wreckage for signs of life so that I may snuff it out as well, adding to the body count. To date I have recorded twenty-one confirmed and unaided kills. Today I hope for my twenty-second. It must be soon. I can feel the cold seeping into my uniform and gloves, a sure sign that my rifle is also beginning to feel the effects. Soon it will become unreliable and I will be forced to retire for the day. I spot movement. Finally. My eye to the rifle’s scope, I zero in upon what used to be a bakery, patiently waiting to see if it was more than a stray flap of cloth flirting with the wind. Again. I smile coldly, my instincts telling me that there is a beating heart hidden somewhere in the scatter of rubble that marks the building. Sure enough, I make out a shape, well camouflaged in white and grey. A Russian soldier. With a practiced ...
    eye, I center the cross hair on where I discern his head to be, my finger tightening almost imperceptibly on the trigger as I force myself to take a deep breath and hold perfectly still… In that heartbeat, the shape turns, and I can make out a face. A woman. From where I lie, hidden in the shadows of a shattered factory, I stop to reflect. The Russian army had swelled its ranks with anyone who could hold a gun. Every man, women, and even children fought and died in defense of this already dead city, holding us here through the summer and fall months until finally winter had reached out and joined them as well, felling as many of my comrades as their bullets and shells. Although I had long ago lost the capacity for sympathy for the hated enemy of the Fatherland, still, to kill a woman struck against the man I had been before we have invaded this country of endless misery and frozen steppes. Carefully, I watch, unable to tell from this distance if she were young or old, fair of face or as ugly as the landscape. It had been a long time since I’d lain with my wife, Elsa. Two years, to be exact, upon a Christmas day as well, a fire warming our cozy little home, our young daughters still sleeping under the goose down Mattress that they shared. We’d made love desperately, knowing that it would be the last time. I’d already received my marching orders. Oh, God, how I long to hold her in my arms once more and feel her kiss. I let my face relax into a smile, my cracked and chapped lips ...
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