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+--- Thread: semiotics (/showthread.php?tid=854)
semiotics - mnemosyne - 10-31-2014
"I dreamt that I had a guinea pig."
Sera's curled up in one of the bedrooms at the chantry. She looks like hell: both eyes blackened from the concussion reality gave her for daring to break its rules - again and again - in flagrant and dramatic fashion. That's okay. She's warm, and the ache is receding and anyway is little more than physical and Dan's bringing her her mug of Darjeeling and her dreams are still close enough to the surface that they seem almost physically present. She can taste magic in her mouth, in her skin, on her tongue. The acid hangover makes her feel just a bit more wretched and a bit more strange and a bit more alive and a bit dreamier than she would otherwise feel. The curtains are drawn or perhaps Dan's shape simply interrupts her view of him and he's laughing, she can feel laughter incipient in her. She knows it will be there before it starts.
And then it starts. "What the hell?" he says along with his laughter, beneath his breath, a bit of a guffaw but fundamentally indulgent rather than querying. He smells like coffee but he's bringing her tea and he looks at her and he aches a little but he knows that this will pass. He knows: that this is already passing. Her hair's a bit oily, sleep-tousled, and he reaches to smooth a few curls out of her face as he hands her tea. "You're not getting a guinea pig. They can't be housebroken. And you wouldn't be able to leave it in a cage."
She's just looking at him, pupils still a bit dilated, this steady - assured - manner she has that always seems both transparent and opaque. She cannot keep a secret, but there are a million mysteries beneath her skin. "I kept him in a closet, not a cage. It was so dark in there and I couldn't see a thing and then I lost him and I went looking for him in a sink full of dishes and then there was this pink nose coming up from the drain."
She is sitting up by then, leaning forward, fingers laced with around her mug. Dan sits on the edge of the bed, half-behind her, then scoots in further, right arm wrapped around her right shoulder, nose against the crown of her head as he breathes in her scent.
"Is this some kind of metaphor?"
"It was a mouse. A little white one. Not my guinea pig. He was white and that color that's like brown but not all the way - like liver or some gross word. And no it isn't a metaphor. Just some fucking acid come-down I got my ass kicked by reality dream."
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
"Good."
"Gonna to to London soon. After Halloween, though. I wanna dress up."
"You can always dress up."
"Yeah, but not like that."
"I'm not coming with you, am I."
"Nope."
"I kinda figured. You're right though."
"About what?"
"Liver. It's such a specific color of fur, I can't think how else to convey that tone. The word doesn't really seem to go with the thing-itself."
"The signifier and the signified."
"Oh fuck. Someone's been reading my old semiotics texts. How do you like de Saussure?"
"Miserable. I only cracked the spine 'cos it sounded French and I wondered if it was poetry."
"Heh. You're right. It is a gross word, liver."
"It's so bloody. It tastes like being torn open. But that's what he was. He was liver-colored. I hate to even say it it's so gross, but he wasn't gross. He was lovely. He made these squealing noises and he had that swirley fur, it wasn't all straight, like a million cowlicks and there was the mouse and then I kept looking for him in the dark, where he'd been, but I couldn't find him anywhere, no matter how much I looked.
"I liked the way he felt in my hands, though. I remember that from the dream. His fast-beating little heart."