He was always an accident waiting to happen, till the day he came home in a box, draped with a flag. No sniper’s bullet had searched him out, no IED surprised him. It was simply a fall from the top of a wall, and a problem with bones that he’d had as a kid, that he hid from the medics who would have said no had they known. Osteogenesis imperfecta. Sounds like a curse from Harry Potter, he joked, then one night he proved himself right. When he fell something snapped, something burst, something tore, and then nothing the medics could do. He bled out in the sand, no enemies near, no gun in his hand, just the pain and the fear; just an accident, no longer waiting.
Andrew Stickland lives in Cambridge, UK, where he writes poetry and fiction and runs the Angles Writers Group. He has published two collections of poetry: Broken Bottles (Envoi Poets) and The Opposite Page (Seal Books) as well as three novels: The Arcadian Incident, Escape to Midas and War Between Worlds (Eye Books).
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