Close the Shutter, Speed the Light

Abstract

This short fiction collection focuses on people challenged to fully integrate with their settings, as they operate either outside of, or against, new and different spaces. These seven stories explore the unsettling relationship of the familiar to the unfamiliar. Characters struggle with tensions of overwhelming barriers to communication and their own human urgency to connect through a common language. Feelings remain unexpressed or ignored due to geography, identity, or the magnitude of emotion. Because of this, control often wanes or disappears. Quiet, atavistic questions of safety and protection underlie the narratives, often probing the invisible effects of violation. Through a range of voices, protagonists teeter between the need to capture and preserve, or the need to shut out what they cannot face.