Love&Darkness explores the significance and repercussions of its title’s binary through a collection of sixteen thematically interconnected pieces, merging YA short stories, experimental fiction, flash fiction, and poetry.

Hard copies of Love&Darkness: Vol.I are available through the Notes & Sketches Shop for $14.00 USD. eBook copies can be downloaded exclusively for Amazon Kindle for $2.99 USD.

In addition to all-new material, Love&Darkness: Vol. I includes remastered versions of pieces previously featured on Notes&Sketches, as well as those published in the University of Washington creative writing journals AU and Bricolage.

A preview of the Table of Contents:

PART I – ACCEPTANCE

1 – All of My Ex-Girlfriends Are Monsters (Reggie DeFatales Must Die: A Cautionary Anecdote in Five Poems and a Limerick)

“So…then what you’re saying is, all your ex-girlfriends have, somehow, banded together, and are now ‘after you’?”

“Yes,” Reggie winced.

“So I’m presuming you broke up with all of them.”

“Correct.”

“And—and since I’ve never met any of them, I’m just going to, uh, take your word for it…they are actual, inhuman creatures?”

“Pretty much.”

“What, with, like, fangs and claws and stuff?”

“Some of them, yeah.”

2 – It’s No Use

3 – A Man’s Got to Have His Priorities

4 – But Crazier Things Have Happened

5 – [Citation Not Needed]

6 – Fear Itself

7 – The Aftermath Villanelle

8 – Were

“How many have lived to tell of this beast’s violence? Likewise, how many moons have waxed and waned with no one caught suffering from curious scars or delirium?”

“Just what do you suggest?” asked the husband with irritation. “That it is a different breed of abomination altogether?”

“The absolute contrary,” the leader explained solemnly. “It is my conviction that he has embraced his nature, and learned to control it.”

 

INTERMISSION I

i – The Three Little Porcites and the Big Bad Lupoid

ii –  Totally Epic

I threw my controller to the couch and stood up. “I’ve got an idea!”

“What, what is it?”

“If we get rid of enough vampires and zombies, maybe they’ll stop making so many stories about them!”

Eddie raised an eyebrow. “You think?”

“It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

iii –  Distribution Methods

iv – Amusement

 

PART 2 – ADAPTATION

1 – Hi!

I rolled onto my back, lamenting as I did that my brand new mattress was less comfortable than my friend’s old one. “She said she wants us to be closer, but it’s not going anywhere.”

“How many dates have you been on?”

“Seven.”

“And…what base are you on?”

“Still making a run for first.”

He winced. “I see.”

“I wish that was the only thing bothering me,” I sighed.

“What do you mean?”

I sat up against the wall. “There’s something…strange about her. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t ignore it.”

2 – Fyrewrit

3 – “One Thousand Ways;” or, “Reinvented.”

The cycle of rejection was abhorrent:

Within and out the home, her nature damned.

And so one dusk, the rain a raging torrent,

She packed her choicest instruments and ran.

With lantern-light her sole and guiding ray,

She staggered past the furthest dead-end street,

Then on the moors, she found a place to stay:

A crippled mansion, straddled in the peat.

4 – The Agents of Fear

Don’t ask me how I know what to call them. Perhaps it’s something I’m meant to, by the very virtue of their presence. It doesn’t matter, because I’m still not afraid. And that’s why I’m writing this.

Because it’s killing me.

5 – Unthinkable

6 – In Finiti

“On this day,” the Magistrate reiterated, pointing at an overlaid date, “a massive meteor shower, the Maslow Cluster, impacted Earth with the force of ten thousand nuclear explosions. Seventy-five percent of the planet’s population died immediately, or over the course of several months… What life survived was violently mutated by exposure to alien chemicals spread throughout the atmosphere and water.” Tima was again quietly awed by the man, showing such calm at the sight.

7 – Ctrl+C

They gave me something, before melting into space as swiftly as they’d appeared. It looks like an SD card, but it’s something much more—a tingling flooded my arm as I pushed it into the port, and when I tried to read the data capacity, there was only a string of strange pictographs. I could recognize one, though: the symbol for “infinity.”

They gave it with a single thought: copy.

8 – Love&Darkness (A Song with No Music)

 

————–

Love

Darkness

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