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You Could Taste the Coal
J. M. Summers
 

​“You could taste the coal.”
The stories are ones he has told 
before, suffering still in his
sick bed. “Smell it, ymhob man,” 
slipping back into the old tongue. 
His lungs labour now, unyielding as
leather, for the breath he is tired
of taking. “No good for anything,
boy. I’ve lived too long.” If you
listen for long enough he will tell 
you about his cousin who had leaned 
into the pit-shaft to look down into 
the darkness, only for the darkness 
to stare back. “That slag heap, it sat 
there black on top of that mountain, 
as tall again, before they grassed it 
over.” You don’t tell him that you 
could remember, that, and the buckets 
that carried the crap above the main 
road to dump it there and return again 
empty. “They flooded the mine, you know, 
to put out the fire, men and boys still
down there,” but that was before your
time, and his. Eventually he will
sleep, face as yellow as the fingers 
stained by a lifetime of roll-ups, as 
the sun sets, frost-bitten, the sky 
red with a different sort of burning, 
the steady light from another planet 
where none of this matters, either.
Picture
Photo by Jean Beaufort
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