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Promises to Keep<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n But I have promises to keep\u2026 And miles to go before I sleep.<\/em> <\/p>\n The branches of the trees stood bare and weightless.\u00a0 A sullen quietness hung in the\u00a0 air.\u00a0 To the right, a flash of squirrel tail in the undergrowth.\u00a0 To the left, nothing but\u00a0 the dank and stagnant pond.\u00a0 It seemed a good place to do it. The eyes \u2013 hooded, wrinkled – swivelled around the clearing again.\u00a0 No other signs of life.\u00a0 Good.<\/p>\n His fingers, fumbling in the cold, caught in the torn pockets of his coat. The container slipped from his grasp.\u00a0 He swore.\u00a0 Typical.\u00a0 His back creaked as he bent down to retrieve it.\u00a0 Impatient to get the thing done he blew on his hands. Some birds flapped skywards.\u00a0 Startled by ghosts.\u00a0 He spat out the phlegm that had risen in his throat and unscrewed the lid.<\/p>\n No words came to him.\u00a0 No prayers, either, just echoes.\u00a0 Curses flung into a room. The slam of a door.\u00a0\u00a0 She would have had plenty to say.\u00a0 She should have died He tipped the container upside down, a swift pouring out, then scuffed at the ashes with his toe.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 His cheeks were numb.\u00a0 He rubbed them, streaking moisture across the grooves of his face.\u00a0 He cleared his throat, turned his back and headed away from the woods, the grey pile already absorbing the damp around it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Carol Caffrey<\/strong>\u2019s work has appeared in Bare Fiction<\/em> and the Fish Anthology<\/em> as well as online.\u00a0 She is a member of Room 204, the Writing West Midlands development programme for emerging writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Promises to Keep But I have promises to keep\u2026 And miles to go before I sleep. –\u00a0 Robert Frost. The branches of the trees stood bare and weightless.\u00a0 A sullen quietness hung in the\u00a0 air.\u00a0 To the right, a flash of squirrel tail in the undergrowth.\u00a0 To the left, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10271"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10273,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions\/10273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n–\u00a0 Robert Frost.<\/p>\n
\nroaring; you\u2019d think that would have been the way she\u2019d go.\u00a0 He could feel the cold\u00a0 seeping into his bones.\u00a0 This place had been warm and alive once.\u00a0 They had been
\nyoung once.<\/p>\n