MicroFlashFiction - Short Stories and Experimental Narratives. '...my experimental approach to writing is suited to this medium...it's an odd kind of laughter sometimes...and it's always in the hidden places...(an ongoing series of) imaginative journeys into experimental fiction...' Writing Review, Q+A - 2024. Steve Coel
Here -
Where...youth stubble walk across butchered sleeping path..
Where...hills consume history and memory is wiped out by nature..
Where...half gloved hands rap on steel plate and small window..
Where...slow of foot shadow wooden shovel..
Where...boasting is frowned upon..
is the place language comes to die.
Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication
Here -
Where...antique van apathy clings to melted future..
Where...layered sounds of gated dog and broken motor serenade gloomy high street..
Where...teenage anger lasts long into retirement..
Where...harmony is seen between broken shop trolley, mid-summer puffa jacket and cannabis vape..
Where...bottom shelf goods are swallowed by small pockets..
is the place language comes to die.
Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication
Rust on Cloth
( 2023 )
The Right Shadow
Grey, when you's staying at Clink Hotel. Black, when you returns home to no fixed address. Each casts the right shadow, makes you invisible. Makes you useful.
Rust on Cloth
You walks along striding lengths of vacant brick where even today you never sees new cars. And sliding pass pub windows that shield sun and rain and bad dreams you gets the full yeasty blast of damp cloth and old men sharing lies over warm beer and brown fingers.
Spare Change for Twisted Feet
People you wants, needs, is every time busy. Is why you's visiting Clink Hotel. Is truth.
Cracked Smile
Like two coins rubbed clear your cracked smile is a daily reminder of the last fight 30 years ago.
No Paths...
Here, where young people never return and there are no paths and old people stop to watch lost cars, is the place language comes to die.
Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication
* A small but well attended mid-week spoken word event in Birmingham. Rust on Cloth came up in conversations. A reminder of previous Birmingham city centre MicroFlashFiction experiments and images from Tin Collector ( An 11.59 Publication) and Born in the Workhouse ( An 11.59 Publication )
Cardiff ( 2023 )
**
Etched into time
etched into St Augustine's headland stone
the daily ritual of dockland kerb
being painted by elderly welders.
**
Dead Air into Warm Harp
Since I bust my legs down The Works I's been spending my mornings blowing dead air into warm harp by Central Library. Bust me heart too truth be told. Lost everything now I has. Still; once I's got enough coin I go gets a mild and Clark's pie in The Vulcan and, more often than not, I ends up chatting to the old girls warming themselves up before they goes to work under the bridge by The Glastonbury. Clink Hotel cross the road tends to get noisy in the afternoon so I wanders back into town for a bit of a stretch and goes and cadges a cup of tea from Asteys before I heads back down Bute to the Sally for warm meal and early bunk. Really I doesn't have time to feel sad. Not me. Trick I finds is to forget past and stick to what I knows. Needs change of shoes mind. Probably find some come Sunday side of hostel door.
MicroFlashFiction
Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication