Experimental Short Fiction - Steve Coel. Documenting through a fictional mirror, responses to the world around us... these experiments are nearly always intuitive and spontaneous. I will continue to publish On - Line. Steve Coel / An 11.59 Publication (August 2026)
Once you bypass
the last starched lightning tree
you enter a hillside world
of midnight stream
and border wire music.
Here, across shilling debris
early shadow
and blisters of high mist,
nature composes movement
from iron and broken bone.
Steve Coel
It's found up along cobbled visions of forgotten towns in times disputed by all who lived them.
In places caught by Pentax and Olympus, children play on empty streets near to crumbled demolished homes.
Tall ships hanging over brick wall skulk in this broken vision. Tall ships made by small people whose dreams, daily smashed, mirror the horror of this passing time.
Close by, crisp tied visitors arrive and soon leave. As they always have and always will. Visitors making quick decisions over local pie and ignored cake.
Windowless empty youth painted buildings now scatter to wind and sudden downpour.
In large open working spaces; in tired dormant, feral communities; few people gather each morning for early shift. Labour here is too vague, mechanical and undisputed. Tiredness is instant and contagious. Jokes are few, clumsy and dulled by lack of echo.
Uniforms, worn in shame, are cheap and ill fitting as they signify nothing but cowardice and lack of respect.
Crouching; doglike alongside a fence corrugated with time, the local old man patters his way home, all memory a slight flicker in grass and paper. Liquid; sweet and delicate, reminds him of people long gone. All are now dismissed with relatives and friends, sweethearts and enemies, photographs and bruises. In a bottle he finds time and peace. In a bottle he becomes young again, a fighter, a winner.
Steve Coel
Today...dry docks glisten with salty channel rain as woollen old men sit on one of their favourite benches. Each will smile broadly as together they remember the songs and laughter of young hard welders. Today...visitors will glance at walls of dismal grey photographs. Some photographs show weary men and women waving half empty beer glasses in the air. Others are of car empty streets clogged with leather boots being dragged to early shifts. And some are of boys playing scrappy football with tight balls of Western and Echo in muddy parks bordered with adverts for cheap beer and bread. Tomorrow...the old men will return and see it all again. The departing visitors will not see them.
Innocence doesn't exist here anymore, not even for the young. No, only dead eyes stare from photographs taken on cheap cameras by drunk uncles.
Standing in the doorway to the Custom House you silently mouth a plea for small change. This is not your regular spot and your recent close shave has gone. The waterside is busy, but you are not, and slowly you are becoming invisible. Eventually, you will disappear leaving only a shadow in each doorway of this street.
Note.
The shadow of a man, each day up from the Sally down the docks. Into town. Stillness. In the doors of the Western and Echo.
