The Space Between Seconds

Hurricane Sandy trundles up the coast. Three lives hang by the thread of one shared relationship that they don’t quite fully understand. As fronts converge, the tide rises. A superstorm forms. Darkness falls, under a sky with a full moon shrouded in clouds, the power fails. This is a story of interwoven lives and the space that separates them, which has a way of tearing this fabric apart and also being the thing that keeps it somehow from fraying. What is stronger? Huge chasms of weighted time? Or the flashes. The pinpoints stitching it all together. It asks - Who are we really? The definitions that society weighs us with? Male Female Christian Muslim White Black Latino Other Highest Level of Education Are You A United States Citizen Check One. The careers we choose? Our love interests’ interests? Single Married Divorced Looking For Love Check One. The meticulously cultivated Instagram feeds? Mayfair Juno Mystery Poet Life Through A Jet Plane Filter or Edit. Or is it the relationships that web delicately across the spread of life that form a sort of dispersion, balancing faith and expectation? Father Mother Wife Son You Are Not The Square Root Of Your Variance. Some strung together dimension that stretches through the pressure of the day’s limits. Pulled by the gravity of responsibilities - what orbits expect - to stay in spinning motion.And then there is the measure of the way light falls. The quiet moments. The hushed breadth when one season moves into another. A pull outside the influence of ordered senses as they reach for some conclusion. A core of whispering impulse to compose that which is both a sum of all this combined experience and also somehow outside of it. In degrees, this wavering sort of self that obscures its own definition illustrates a world that is brimming with ways to connect people. Below the surface, in all this subtlety, is something else altogether, a story that turns on the impulse to see others captured by their own contrast.

Robert F Schatzman is the author of three novels. His first book, That Which We Carry Into The Wind, was published in 2014. His second, Built To Be Boundless, was published in 2015. He is a huge proponent National Novel Writing Month, which brings together the great effort for words each November, and a year round emboldening of writers young and old. He lives in Neptune NJ with his wife Merritt and their son Lachlan. This is his third book.