scrubjayspeaks

Every night, she saw visions of the End, sketched out in blood and muzzle flash and chains forged link by callous link by people who called themselves saviors and heroes. Every morning, she fed the chickens and brought the neighbor their mail and taught herself to fix the sink when it broke. This was not a contradiction, nor an abdication, but as natural and right a response as taking the next breath.

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LL#1269

“I thought fairy rings were supposed to grow where tree stumps were rotting,” he said, gazing out over the field, “or spots where something dead and buried was decaying.” She looked up from where she had been closely examining a rough line of fruiting bodies, then she guided him over to one edge that gave a better view. She swept her arm out to indicate a long, one might say draconic, curve as of a tail joining a vast body, picked out in assorted mushrooms, and grimly said, “Yes, exactly.”

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LL#1267

The onset of summer weather has dried out soil, especially in garden pots, to the point that even the most root-bound plants seem light enough to blow away. Reports indicate some have begun doing just that, with reports coming in of flying petunias and drifting daffodils trailing roots as they wander lonely as a cloud. It remains to be seen if they are simply at the mercy of the winds in their lightened state, or if this is a deliberate attempt at migration in search of water.

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LL#1265

The lake monster, having spent the afternoon basking in the sun and startling several unsuspecting hikers along the shore, made lazy spirals down into the deep waters to cool off again. Down in the depths where its eyes would mean nothing and only the microcurrents across its whiskers could show the way, it heard things breathing, dreaming dark fantasies painted in movement and temperature. It was reassuring to think that, just as it could offer mystery and surprise to the shore people, there would always be stranger things, deeper things, to do the same for it.

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LL#1263

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