Strange Meeting by Stig Rune

It was summer and there was only one day left of our summer holiday. The next morning I
would have to go to school again. I had thought of this day all summer. I was nervous because I was the oldest one at school the year before, and this year I would be the youngest again. It was kind of scary, and I was only thirteen years old. I told my father earlier that summer that I wished to break my leg the day before school started so I wouldn’t have to go. I don’t know why I wanted to break my leg because there are more reasonable things that could happen that would keep home from school. But that’s what I told my father and that’s what I hoped would happen.

So this was the last day before school, the last day of fun. It was a beautiful sunny day and the rest of the team and I ran out on the pitch to warm up. We were looking forward to ending the vacation with a football match and hopefully with a victory. We were playing against a team from my father’s birthplace, so many of my relatives had come to support me. I would have given anything to win this match and as an attacker hoped to score some goals. The score was 3-1 to us after two goals made by me, and we had played about 25 minutes of the first half. Somebody on my team had passed me a long ball as they often did because of my speed, but this time it was a little too long. The goalkeeper was running against the ball from one side and me from the other side. It was him against me. I ran as fast as I could and so did the keeper, but I got to the ball first and kicked, but the keeper thought he had it also, and so he also kicked. He missed the ball but he hit my leg. It was extremely painful, and I couldn’t walk for the next hundred days, one of the bones in my leg had broken into two pieces. Of course I thought of my wish, I often did and I still do. It was the worst time of my life; I couldn’t play the game I loved.

I never knew who the goalkeeper of the other team was, and I’m sort of glad I didn’t know for some time, because I wasn’t happy with him. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but still. About ten years later I met my girlfriend, with whom I now live. After we had been together for a while, I met her brother. This was something I had looked forward to, because he was the same age as me, and he liked football. We got to know each other and became good friends. We often talked about football, and I knew from the first day I met him that he was a goalkeeper. I also knew that he played for the team from my father’s birthplace, but I never thought that he could be the one who had broken my leg, because I remember that somebody told me one time that the goalkeeper’s name was Roy and his name was Rune. But one day I told him about the incident and then he admitted that it had to be him. Because he remembered that he injured a player very badly one time, and he had always been the goalkeeper for that team. As I said earlier we were good friends and we still are. But I’m glad I didn’t know him back then.

(In response to Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting".)