Red Snow

Sticky, darkened hair clung to his ghostly forehead, a stark contrast to the pristine white snow brushed fiercely onto the surrounding landscape. Trenches scarred the ground. Johan Müller’s frantic eyes burned in the frigid gale as they flitted around to find his comrades. They were corpses before they died; the only way Johan could tell they weren’t alive anymore was from their blinkless, frosty stares, snowflakes the bullets that killed them.

The Stalingrad winter was unforgiving.

A groan beside him. Johan blinked his limp blue eyes and faced the noise. The groan was a young man, grimy and unravelled. For him, it was a bullet. His ragged uniform grasped at his sweaty, papery skin. Red snow. Johan recognized the taller boy.

“Peter?” Why did he ask a question he knew the answer to? Was it denial, hoping he was wrong? Again, “Peter?”

The groan spoke breathily: “Hey, arschloch,” it said. Hey, asshole.

Rising to his knees, Johan forgot the snow biting his fingers and fisted his hands in the iciness. “Peter,” he repeated; it seemed he could say nothing else.

“Aren’t you…?” Peter coughed feebly. “Aren’t you going to tell me what a dummkopf I am?” His voice whistled away.

Johan mouthed it this time: “Peter.” Something profound happened in that moment—a life became a death. Two German soldiers sat in the snow. Dozens more slept around them. But only one of them seemed to be laughing.



Johan’s eyes flew open, though the rest of him remained still. The nightmare seeped from his pores as perspiration. He could still feel the dirt in his hair, dyeing the blonde strands black. His teeth ached remembering such cold; his hands were drenched in white. He could still see the red snow before him.

Peter. This time it was only a thought. The silence scratched at his ears.

But he was safe now. He was home. Heartbeat hammering away, Johan looked at the wall where a shaky script read:

My name is Johan Müller.
It is 1943.
I am in Germany.
I am 19.
I am okay.

Mama is in the next room, Johan told himself. I’m okay, I’m okay. Red snow, red snow.

It had taken him so long to die. Peter was shot five hours before he perished. Johan had slept too long. The winter was a tranquilizer. He finally woke curled up to Tommy Ludwig. The other man was a statue of pain; he had no pulse.

Johan pressed two fingers to his own wrist now. After a paralyzing moment, a gentle beat drummed steadily on his fingertips. I am alive, he assured himself.

Peter softly bled. Johan remembered how stubborn that man was—he probably held on as long as he did because he would not leave without saying goodbye to his best friend. Arschloch, he’d called him. He must’ve forgotten Johan’s name.

That patch of red snow. It was as bright as a smile; it swallowed Johan’s vision. The freezing wind ate him.

These flashbacks followed him down the hall. He let his left hand graze against the wall as he walked. The lumpy texture was grounding. Thumb, index, middle, stub, stub. Frostbite took two of his fingers and three of his toes. He stopped at the open doorway to his Mama’s bedroom. It was peaceful in there, her stout wooden form exhaling in gusts, inhaling with creaks. His tormented mind couldn't enter that room. He merely stood at the threshold, surveying the only serenity to be found in Munich, Germany at that time.

“Are you a soldier?” a small boy had asked him soon after he’d come back from Stalingrad.

Johan didn’t speak. He shook his head slightly and walked away. Johan despised labels. Labels were expectations, and expectations were ultimately disappointments. He was sick of being a disappointment.

Into the wind of his Mama’s breathing, Johan whispered, “I should have died there. It was my turn, right? First Alex, then me?” He paused, remembering his brave older brother, proudly marching off to war, never to come home. “I wish I’d died out there.” The quiet admission was loud enough to rouse Frau Müller from her slumber.

“Johan?” she questioned, eyes caked in weariness.

“Go back to sleep, Mama,” Johan said.

She didn’t resist the command.

Red snow. Crystals of ice tinted scarlet. He died before my eyes, Johan thought. It should have been me.

In Johan’s cramped mind, Peter Solinger’s body twisted into a black swastika. His blood encased him. That snowy tomb was stamped with Hitler’s mark.

“Look,” it said. “I’ve touched the whole world.”