scrubjayspeaks

The many mirrors of the Beacon House sometimes spent too long reflecting each other, an endless tunnel of silvered glass that slowly lost more and more light as it iterated. So in spring, when the sun was growing stronger, the keepers methodically rearranged them, rotating new ones out to the positions that caught more of the house’s white walls and broad lower windows, breaking up pairs that had gone too far down dark alleys. Up into the high reaches of the tower, new light bounced, refreshed, renewed, rekindled, to illuminate those in need.

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LL#1261

A new water polo team has been formed and will be hosting tryouts this weekend for those with the skills, confidence, and possibly foolishness to compete. The kelpies seem extremely, perhaps even disturbingly excited for their part on the teams, and we noticed a suspicious lack of polo mallets or balls at the hastily constructed lakeside clubhouse. We recommend anyone trying out also be scuba certified and bring an alternative source of oxygen, just in case the kelpies are excited about something else entirely.

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LL#1259

The dark entity had prided itself on choosing so pliant a tool: naive, kind-hearted, eager to please someone who showed her the merest shreds of affection and attention. When it offered her the ring of power, it expected her to succumb to the temptation, but it did not expect enthusiasm and tears of joy. It soon discovered that plans to plunge the world into darkness are remarkably easy to derail when pitted against the single-minded determination of a bride-to-be with a wedding to organize.

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LL#1257

While used bookstores and libraries dreaded the endless copies of popular books that flooded them in waves, he was only too happy to take duplicates off their hands for cheap. He was a scientist, after all, and he needed plenty of identical subjects on which to perform his experimental book rebindings. So far, romance novels had shown willing and able to graft onto nearly all other genres, their stitched-together pages gradually melding plots and transplanted characters as the stories attempted to achieve coherence.

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LL#1255

After many years of hiatus, the Infrequent Buyers Club has been restarted, thanks to sponsorship by Quartz Family Hardware. This repair and repurposing society provides community-owned tools, like sewing machines and welders, to wring every bit of use out of anything a person owns, with monthly prizes at meetings for the oldest functional piece of equipment brought in for demonstration. And for those who truly can’t let go of a belonging, members are experimenting with animate object necromancy, using the club’s old beverage fridge as a case study.

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LL#1253

“Listen, you remember in the seventies,” he began coaxingly and, despite her expression of disbelief at even that early stage of the argument, pressed on ever more earnestly, “when they were making unicorns out of goats?” During this circuitous history of surgical mythologizing, the pony paid them entirely no attention, being much more interested in charging the fence separating it from the cows pastured next door, followed by laboriously extracting its collection of sharp horns from where they had embedded in the fence posts. “While I admire your commitment to the principle of ‘more is more,’” she said from a location safely near the gate, “what you’ve made is less mythical creature and more miniature equine murder beast.”

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LL#1251

Many of them were blind, fully or partially, though some, like her, simply couldn’t bear the overwhelming light of the world and so wore blindfolds to block it out. None of them needed to see in the fog banks, where all was glaucous and shifting, and none of them could afford to be distracted from more vital senses. They moved in careful formation, weighted nets gathered in their hands, and waited for the telltale pressure shifts that would indicate a passing school of fog fish.

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LL#1249

The Lake Lewisia habitat improvement project is looking for volunteers to assist with reweirding a largely defunct strip mall in the next town over. Having driven out its locally-owned competitors, the strip mall ownership has abandoned it to time, the elements, and fortunately, our tender and bizarre attentions. With volunteer help, we plan to establish an incomprehensible junk shop, a foundational alley cryptid population, and a wall of street art rife with hidden messages, which will greatly improve the conditions for our neighbors.

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LL#1247

For creatures consisting primarily of teeth, they posed little risk to explorers even in the deepest, most unwelcoming caves, but they could hardly be described as harmless. The roots of mountains surrendered slowly to their gnawing, like granite-fueled gophers tunneling through a planet-wide garden. Legends said they would, one day, unmoor those mountains and set them floating up to become cloud islands, leaving fallow fields far below after that strange harvest.

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LL#1245

Easily distracted, she learned to set alarms and timers for just about everything in her daily life, so it didn’t strike her as odd when something in her bedroom started chiming. That it proved to be coming from the pocket of her winter coat, so recently put away for the year, stirred her curiosity, however. She looked inside the pocket, and found herself transported to a snowy landscape under a woolen sky, in which ominous bells were tolling out warnings of some great task forgotten.

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LL#1243