Fic: Seven Meditations on Problems of Cognition (Firefly, River/Kaylee)
Title: Seven Meditations on Problems of Cognition
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing/Characters: River/Kaylee, Simon
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers/Continuity: AU, set between "Objects in Space" and Serenity.
Summary: River observes some inconsistent patterns of imagery.
Word count: exactly 1000
Disclaimers: Firefly and Serenity are the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2006 Mosca. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy, distraction77, and sathinks for beta reading. Written for the Picture Is Worth 1000 Words Challenge, based on this picture. The section headers are from "The Match Girl Lights Them One By One," a poem by Rachel Contreni Flynn.
I must not envy sparrows.
You are a bird, only it's the nest that flies. They pulled out the feathers in your wings and replaced them with artificial ones constructed of lambswool and circuitry. They told you that these are better. You will never molt, and microchips are wiser than neurons. But the feathers are growing back, and they itch. When you scratch, Simon takes the knife out of your hand. It's not a toy, he says, as if you're still preliterate. As if the 'verse were prelapsarian. You were only trying to cut them off, you say. You were only trying to keep yourself from becoming Icarus, from turning feathers into stars.
I must not punish my body.
The wires in your arms used to suppress your hormones. You were to be superhuman, transhuman, and the chemical transmitters were holdovers from ancestors already extinct, too much screeching and not enough processor speed. The chemicals, restored, are unrelenting. Your cunt leaves patterns in the bedsheets. Your clit swells crimson with the memory of apples, of exertion.
Kaylee has her hands in a beating heart, covered in grease. Blood and choler thrum under the floor. You grand-jeté over the doorframe, through the pericardium. She should smear her black hands all over you. She sees your interlocking parts, the joints and conduits, their seamless cooperation when you leap. She sees innocent, ungreased mei mei, all sanguine and no melancholy. She raises up her hands to keep you at bay. She won't pierce you, and the humours stay inside.
I must not pull the wings off.
Steep landing and the atmosphere screams friction all the way to the locks. It's raining. Serenity tilts her head back. It's drought season, and she's an ancient animal, her pelt mottled with umber. Her only habitat is the sky. She's waiting to turn back into a spaceship, so she might as well take a shower. You pity her this disadvantage: you can be a girl almost anywhere. You go out in the rain and the captain scolds you. No time to be a girl when there's work to be done. "No time like the present," he says when you stir the mud with your toes. He thinks that the purpose of a girl is work, and though he can be simple he has the benefit of experience. You can't be a girl unless you're doing what you've been made and remade for. You have to swing your arms and hear with your mind, to crouch with the promise of a strike.
You leave muddy slices of feet behind you. Serenity is a patient girl. There is money in dry hair and clean toes trapped in boots, waiting to be girl-feet.
I must not disinfect everything.
Simon's belongings have fallen into disorder. You would rearrange them by color, but all he wears is gray. The blue shirt that you bought him doesn't constitute a category. You throw clothes onto the floor until a pattern emerges. They divide discretely into groups. One: the things that obscure his soul. Two: the things that attract unwanted attention. Three: the things that reveal him to be a pirate. You know he'll be angry when he sees that you've unballed his socks, but some procedures must be undergone.
A boy would be good for him, you think. He believes the physicist's superstition of attractive opposites, but his charge is almost neutral. He would say you are projecting your desires onto him, offering an untenable alternative so that you can get what you want. The way it always went when you were children, and he wanted to stay home but you pleaded for shadowplays or ice cream. But you hear him longing for something bigger than him, and safe.
That's why he doesn't shout when he steps into the disorder. He doesn't always see the signifiers, but he's smart enough to notice when there's a metaphor.
I must not shrivel into dust mites.
You are all cunt this evening. You open up your legs, naked under your dress. Kaylee is rehydrating potatoes for supper. Her nipples are stones trapped under the cherry blossoms on her shirt. She asks you for help. A knife blade will trim the cherry branches and send the spores towards continued generativity. "There ain't nothing to cut," she says. But she only sees how the parts fit together materially. You show her how tongues fit into mouths, a parody of penetration that anyone can sing. She sighs and places your palms on her breasts. The cherry blossoms fly away.
You're mostly mind and feet again later, and you sissonne down to your bunk. Simon is sitting on your bed again, making his memories flammable. "Your stroke order's wrong," you say. This makes him angrier than the cherry blossoms. He's already watched them float down the river, wrinkle brown and sink away.
I must not dream inside a chimney.
Here on the edge of the universe, where nobody cares if you die of tuberculosis, the smokestacks vomit into a vermillion sky. This planet's god has three eyes, and one of them is always closed. This is good soil for dandelions and clover. Kaylee makes garlands and spins them into your hair. You scrunch your toes in the chemical soil. Those smokestacks refine the fuel that keeps you flying.
You stand up on your tiptoes and drill a pirouette into the dirt. Chains of dead weeds fly out of your hair and turn into feathers. Kaylee catches them and lays them across her lap. "How can you dance when there ain't any music?" she says. But the local god has one eye open, and the effluent moans like a ge hu ten feet under your tiptoes.
I must not seek comfort from this.
The arch of her body is a conic section, a hyperbola with its mirror in the turn of the engine. Calculate its first derivative, her rate of change. Your fingers in her cunt will serve as an abacus. She will leave feathers behind when she screams your name, and they will envermeil the black in a fine knife line all the way to Persephone, turning the stars into girls with their legs spread wide, their mouths and their cunts stretched into perfect circles.
Fandom: Firefly
Pairing/Characters: River/Kaylee, Simon
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers/Continuity: AU, set between "Objects in Space" and Serenity.
Summary: River observes some inconsistent patterns of imagery.
Word count: exactly 1000
Disclaimers: Firefly and Serenity are the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2006 Mosca. This story is a labor of love, not money, so it's protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.
Notes: Thanks to callmesandy, distraction77, and sathinks for beta reading. Written for the Picture Is Worth 1000 Words Challenge, based on this picture. The section headers are from "The Match Girl Lights Them One By One," a poem by Rachel Contreni Flynn.
I must not envy sparrows.
You are a bird, only it's the nest that flies. They pulled out the feathers in your wings and replaced them with artificial ones constructed of lambswool and circuitry. They told you that these are better. You will never molt, and microchips are wiser than neurons. But the feathers are growing back, and they itch. When you scratch, Simon takes the knife out of your hand. It's not a toy, he says, as if you're still preliterate. As if the 'verse were prelapsarian. You were only trying to cut them off, you say. You were only trying to keep yourself from becoming Icarus, from turning feathers into stars.
I must not punish my body.
The wires in your arms used to suppress your hormones. You were to be superhuman, transhuman, and the chemical transmitters were holdovers from ancestors already extinct, too much screeching and not enough processor speed. The chemicals, restored, are unrelenting. Your cunt leaves patterns in the bedsheets. Your clit swells crimson with the memory of apples, of exertion.
Kaylee has her hands in a beating heart, covered in grease. Blood and choler thrum under the floor. You grand-jeté over the doorframe, through the pericardium. She should smear her black hands all over you. She sees your interlocking parts, the joints and conduits, their seamless cooperation when you leap. She sees innocent, ungreased mei mei, all sanguine and no melancholy. She raises up her hands to keep you at bay. She won't pierce you, and the humours stay inside.
I must not pull the wings off.
Steep landing and the atmosphere screams friction all the way to the locks. It's raining. Serenity tilts her head back. It's drought season, and she's an ancient animal, her pelt mottled with umber. Her only habitat is the sky. She's waiting to turn back into a spaceship, so she might as well take a shower. You pity her this disadvantage: you can be a girl almost anywhere. You go out in the rain and the captain scolds you. No time to be a girl when there's work to be done. "No time like the present," he says when you stir the mud with your toes. He thinks that the purpose of a girl is work, and though he can be simple he has the benefit of experience. You can't be a girl unless you're doing what you've been made and remade for. You have to swing your arms and hear with your mind, to crouch with the promise of a strike.
You leave muddy slices of feet behind you. Serenity is a patient girl. There is money in dry hair and clean toes trapped in boots, waiting to be girl-feet.
I must not disinfect everything.
Simon's belongings have fallen into disorder. You would rearrange them by color, but all he wears is gray. The blue shirt that you bought him doesn't constitute a category. You throw clothes onto the floor until a pattern emerges. They divide discretely into groups. One: the things that obscure his soul. Two: the things that attract unwanted attention. Three: the things that reveal him to be a pirate. You know he'll be angry when he sees that you've unballed his socks, but some procedures must be undergone.
A boy would be good for him, you think. He believes the physicist's superstition of attractive opposites, but his charge is almost neutral. He would say you are projecting your desires onto him, offering an untenable alternative so that you can get what you want. The way it always went when you were children, and he wanted to stay home but you pleaded for shadowplays or ice cream. But you hear him longing for something bigger than him, and safe.
That's why he doesn't shout when he steps into the disorder. He doesn't always see the signifiers, but he's smart enough to notice when there's a metaphor.
I must not shrivel into dust mites.
You are all cunt this evening. You open up your legs, naked under your dress. Kaylee is rehydrating potatoes for supper. Her nipples are stones trapped under the cherry blossoms on her shirt. She asks you for help. A knife blade will trim the cherry branches and send the spores towards continued generativity. "There ain't nothing to cut," she says. But she only sees how the parts fit together materially. You show her how tongues fit into mouths, a parody of penetration that anyone can sing. She sighs and places your palms on her breasts. The cherry blossoms fly away.
You're mostly mind and feet again later, and you sissonne down to your bunk. Simon is sitting on your bed again, making his memories flammable. "Your stroke order's wrong," you say. This makes him angrier than the cherry blossoms. He's already watched them float down the river, wrinkle brown and sink away.
I must not dream inside a chimney.
Here on the edge of the universe, where nobody cares if you die of tuberculosis, the smokestacks vomit into a vermillion sky. This planet's god has three eyes, and one of them is always closed. This is good soil for dandelions and clover. Kaylee makes garlands and spins them into your hair. You scrunch your toes in the chemical soil. Those smokestacks refine the fuel that keeps you flying.
You stand up on your tiptoes and drill a pirouette into the dirt. Chains of dead weeds fly out of your hair and turn into feathers. Kaylee catches them and lays them across her lap. "How can you dance when there ain't any music?" she says. But the local god has one eye open, and the effluent moans like a ge hu ten feet under your tiptoes.
I must not seek comfort from this.
The arch of her body is a conic section, a hyperbola with its mirror in the turn of the engine. Calculate its first derivative, her rate of change. Your fingers in her cunt will serve as an abacus. She will leave feathers behind when she screams your name, and they will envermeil the black in a fine knife line all the way to Persephone, turning the stars into girls with their legs spread wide, their mouths and their cunts stretched into perfect circles.