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A Few Regrets<\/strong><\/p>\n He was from somewhere close to inhospitable \u2013 the north of Russia, maybe. His act involved tearing guests from middle aisles and inserting them into backless chairs. He would pitch his waxed palms sideways and dribble towards the ceiling \u2013 it was all kinds of hypnotic and creepy. They each shouted out a few recent regrets \u2013 one middle-aged man with shaking peppered wrists had not seen his kids for weeks. His excuse was one of awkwardness \u2013 his plus one was close to leaving. A young woman, wrapped in various degrees of cascading, milky knitwear, had saut\u00e9ed her husband\u2019s meetings suit with cauliflower and chestnut mushrooms. When everyone laughed she sort of did too, a strange and lungless gurgle \u2013 this was probably all part of the act. Some silent twins, who wrote alternating chapters of a mystery novel from separate bedrooms, had passed out next to a patio heater \u2013 both sides of their necks were badly burnt, their raw knuckles a cute shade of red. After forty or so minutes he had run out of volunteers. He squinted past the swiveling stage lights, like a witness to a lunar eclipse. I slunk deeper into my seat, thinking about the night before last \u2013 about how it was just a little regret, but the kind that swells and welts, like a sink that no longer swallows, or an ache you choose to ignore.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alex Townend<\/strong> is a writer and musician living in London. He is a graduate of the Goldsmiths Creative Writing MA and is currently working towards his first collection of poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Few Regrets He was from somewhere close to inhospitable \u2013 the north of Russia, maybe. His act involved tearing guests from middle aisles and inserting them into backless chairs. He would pitch his waxed palms sideways and dribble towards the ceiling \u2013 it was all kinds of hypnotic and creepy. They […]<\/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-13398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13398","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=13398"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13821,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13398\/revisions\/13821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}