Oversight

A small collection of dark science fiction by Bram Stoker Award-winning author Michael Bailey. Includes "Darkroom" and "SAD Face" (novelettes), and "Fade to Black" (short story). DARKROOM: After living most of her life blindfolded, for fear of what she might see, Grace shifts though time in a series of strange experiments involving old-fashioned black-and-white photography in order to create a flipbook of her father aging in reverse. Near completion of her project, and no longer able to go through with it on her own, she brings along her likewise blindfolded and temporarily deafened sister, for fear of what they might also hear in their travels, and together they take snapshots, wandering their childhood home, hand-in-hand, albeit with added disabilities to protect them from that which doesn't hide so well in the past. The undeveloped, they soon discover, what they'd forgotten of their troubled youth, is perhaps more frightening than what they later develop in the darkroom. SAD FACE: Yuliya dons a prosthetic face designed to help her cope with Social Anxiety Disorder, the essential oil infused mask not only disguising her expression, but the wet city stench as it soothes. Time, it can only stop when someone takes a photo, and that's what they did, whoever made it; they took her picture and made her a mask to hide behind whenever social phobia bullied her. A dead-face: expressionless, eyes only visible through open sockets, mouth slightly parted; the way she imagined she'd look the day she died. And now, whenever someone sees her, or stares at her, wearing her Yuliya mask, they are looking at her past. Yet behind her SAD face, she sometimes finds confidence, until she takes it off to uncover the woman hiding beneath. FADE TO BLACK: A bonus short story that explores optophobia, the fear of opening one's eyes.