Seven Names for Light

Abstract

Seven Names for Light Marc Labriola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A woman gives birth in a room where all the windows are covered with pages of a book to be burned. The woman inside, the women outside: all wait for the author. Luz is going to scream. She can't drag her body any closer to the bed, so it will happen where she fell. There is a sound she thinks has come from her. Down her thighs she feels something she knows is not what it feels like. Now a faint odor of semen. Her black hair is dripping. The lights shut off again. There have been rolling blackouts since the night it happened. She's covered all the windows of her third-floor apartment with pages from the book they will eventually burn. She can't let the women see her. Luz pulls off her towel. Her eyes haven't adjusted to the dark. Between her legs little drops slowly cool into glass eyes on the tiles. The blood on the floor would have been red. [End Page 14] There is a shock in her waist. Her body jumps like falling in her sleep. This is her first so Luz doesn't know what hurts when. She can't get to her phone. Her heels slip as she pushes back towards the bed. The water on the floor isn't water. Luz can't breathe anymore. They tell you to breathe. Just make it to the bed. She can't let the women hear her. Luz gropes around the dark floor for something to put in her mouth. Her apartment is half empty now. Just the things that survived. She can still see the rusted steel bars like fossilized ribs where seven months ago pieces of the concrete ceiling collapsed in the earthquake. She bites down on her lip until she can taste it. If this were a dream it would be a symbol of something. It wasn't hard for them to find her. He never should have used the real names of the streets in the novel. They won't leave her alone now they know the father is Gabriel Luria. Her apartment has already been broken into three times. Looted for charms or souvenirs. They took coins, earrings, forks and knives, her lipstick, hairbrush. Anything she touched. Even pulled the sheets off her bed. Luz doesn't want this to happen here. Those strange women waiting in the street. It's too soon. She has six days' clothes packed in the suitcase on her bed. But Luz is one week early. She shuts her eyes tight and mouths her list of baby names that mean colours. Her favourite boy's name means red. This is when Luz screams. Someone outside must have heard the voice of a woman through the wall screaming God. But she knows that at a certain distance she is not a woman screaming. She is just a sound someone thought they heard. Blamed on other things. If you're far enough away, even the worst earthquake in living memory is just a little fetal kick. She listens. No one is coming. She knocks the candle and lighter off the table with the tips of her fingers. Flicks the wheel and it lights. In the book, Gabriel says to her, with your clothes off, I count seven different colours. He says the blue blood in the veins on your legs is not really blue. It's just the behaviour of light coming and going from your skin. Of everything we don't know we mostly don't know about light. Luz bites down hard on the back of her hand. Trying to siphon the pain. Don't let them hear. Day and night they're out there with their dog-eared copies of the book, famous around the world because the day the earthquake happened was the same day the novel said it would happen. The book says a comet from the genitals of the constellation Leo entered the womb of the constellation Virgo in a celestial insemination on exactly the night of July 17, the night of...