Casualties of the War of Words

Throughout the night following their altercation, his dreams painted the scarred landscape of a continuing battlefield...fragments of sentences, some detonated and some still lying dormant. New retaliations, like unspent shells, were littered across the terrain. To pick them up, or to let them lie? How important WAS this alliance--enough so, to surrender his own soul?

Come morning, he approached the kitchen for coffee on interrogative alert; hostility greeted him without delay. It was all the spark his guarded ammunition needed. Fully loaded from the pickings of the night before, he raised his verbal automatic and squeezed the trigger.