Finger Heart
Zac Walsh
The journey of the light coming through the small room of Ibn al-Haytham’s home which projected an upside-down world before him to the electric impulses manifesting as his mind as he wrote his Book of Optics lasted eight centuries, touching others, until it reached the drawing board of Daguerre where that same light pecked at the man until he allowed to it crack him open, reflecting the world irrevocably and irreversibly back onto itself, and the light was made of that which cannot relent so it alit upon the roll-film and filament alike, giving the illusion all the way that it ever goes off, and on it danced in bulbform and taking the form of a bulb it knew what it was to suffer as bulbs do and so it offered itself to the the darkness, knowing that bulbs are pathetic, finite, and in making this sacrifice the light which could only give light was therefore able to power the cleverly crafted electric frontier, a place made to where it is good to light out and nothing more, an infinite playspace for sight to be seen in a new light, a finally infallible light, a light without beginning and without end because it is the very whiteness behind the light each bulb sees as it shatters, this singular journey which began long before Ibn al-Haytham, of course, one could argue all the way back to the Chinese or the Greeks, but both would argue otherwise, and then there were the Sumerians who mapped out the solar system in lasting stone six millenia before Newton was born by manipulating this same light upon itself, the light both the bow and arrow reaching all the way to Pluto and back, ever back, no steps forward all steps back is what it is to ride alongside a beam of light, until it loops back around like an earthending stone completing the magic route with the simple wave of a selfie wand as god knows how many borrowers of this inseparable light fall from such great heights each year, self-reliant stargazers, fully embracing only their precious and individual part, the conveyance fragile, like vital pudding wrapped in store-bought bread, and on the way down some imagine there must be one so defiant to the tenors of time that she holds the phone that holds the camera towards her plummet as her last backdrop and with the other hand two fingers cross, creating for the instant a heart that is the last hopeful piece of her to come undone on the concrete parking lot below, just a stone’s throw from the Vistaview Photo Center, where for a limited time only 8x10s are 2 for 1.
Zac Walsh is the author of An End of Speaking and Love in the Utmost. His work has appeared in journals such as Two Thirds North, Stonecoast, Caustic Frolic, Calliope, Gold Man Review, Last Leaves, Blue Unicorn, LUMINA, Gulf Stream, Cimarron Review, Oakwood, Alligator Juniper, The Awakenings Review, The Other Journal, Inscape, Big Lucks, Lime Hawk, Spectre Magazine, the DuPage Valley Review and The Platte Valley Review, as well as in the anthologies Extrasensory Overload, Blood on the Floor and Small Batch. He lives in a small, unincorporated town in Oregon with his wife and a very old dog.
