Casualty 101
The boy looked down at the line, drawn onto the dusty earth with an eerie red paint. It zigzagged to and fro over the ‘border’, set up over twenty years before he was born. A decaying body, which had bullet holes pummelled throughout it, was situated on the opposite side of the line, just a few metres from where he was stood- a stark reminder of what could happen to anyone who tried to cross it. Broken glass, scraps of barbed wire and shrapnel littered the ground like hundreds and thousands on a cake. But the boy was tired of this line- he couldn’t see his family, his friends or his neighbours. A government line, set up to stop fighting. It hadn't worked; it simply increased the tensions on both sides. He took a step forward, his toes just centimetres from the line of death. A soldier stood up opposite him, waved a gun and muttered in a foreign language; he didn’t want to kill the boy, but he was a protector of the line. The boy simply smiled at him, wavered for a second, but persevered. With a simple hop, he passed the line and entered a new world; a world where death by shooting was acceptable. It only took one shot and the lifeless body of the young, innocent boy fell in a heap on the dusty earth. He had became casualty 101.
What do you think? More soon.
