Louisiana Literature Press is proud to announce the publication of Daren Dean’s prose chapbook, lovesick.
The book is currently available for purchase through our press store (Please remember to specify title and author when submitting payment via PayPal.). The book will also be listed on Amazon.com in the near future.
From lovesick
I found you. I didn’t know I was looking for you and here I went and found you.
Chism now looked at her obliquely, “Well, she’s got her reasons. I don’t blame her at all. She ought to hate me and so should you too, probably.”
“I heard about your brother. Is that why you came back?” She looked up at him and her expression gave him pause.
A kind of stage fright overtook him. Trying to find the words to explain a failed relationship from so long ago felt like an impossibility in that moment. He wanted to talk to her about it but where to begin made his tongue falter. “Partly,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. “I wanted to see you too . . . meet you. I know that sounds lame.” He wished he hadn’t said that last part.
“She said you didn’t want me,” Vels said as if she were testing the waters for a confession from him to confirm or deny. “She said you must have hated us since you never came back from the war. I thought it must be all my fault. If I hadn’t been born maybe you would have wanted to come home.”
Chism shook his head with a jerk like a boxer absorbing a vicious left hook. He opened his mouth but no words came out. Words didn’t matter and still he was compelled to use them for a lack of any concrete way to convey an emotion. The words ultimately didn’t matter as much as the feeling they left or a person had as the result of coming to a mute cul-de-sac. How to explain himself all at once, when it took her entire lifetime to get himself to this moment. The futility of words to answer such direct feelings also left him speechless when he knew all she really wanted was to be comforted. To be told she was loved. To be told she mattered. To be reunited and whole in a way she had never been.
About Our Author
Daren Dean is the author of seven books, Far Beyond the Pale. I’ll Still Be Here Long After You’re Gone: Stories, The Black Harvest: A Novel of the American Civil War. This Vale of Tears, Roads, The New Salvation and Other Stories, and Shelter Me (forthcoming Fall 2025 from Livingston Press). The Black Harvest was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner, the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction, and Midlands Author Award. Roads was a featured Indie review in Kirkus Reviews in 2023. Dean is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lincoln University of Missouri. He lives in Missouri with his wife and children.