Echoes on Lavender Lane

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On Lavender Lane, every house hummed with polite music. Every hedge was trimmed to the inch. And every resident greeted one another with a brightness that bordered on performance.

But there was one house at the end of the lane—Number 11—that had been vacant for decades. Or so they said.

Inside that house, behind curtained windows and a door that creaked like a forgotten violin, lived Cassia Merrow, the Lane’s former Etiquette Instructor. No one had seen her in years.

That is, until someone started mimicking the residents.

Perfectly.

Flawlessly.

Too flawlessly.

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At first, it was just little things. The mailman would hear his own voice echo from behind the hedges. A child would find her drawing returned to her doorstep—finished, but better than she remembered.

Then the mimicry turned emotional.

One woman cried behind closed doors—only to find her sobs perfectly replicated in the alley that night.

A man laughed at a comedy special. Hours later, that same laugh echoed from Cassia’s mailbox.

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Whispers grew: Cassia's house is alive.

But in truth, Cassia had created a machine—the Echo Box. It was meant to preserve the “best” version of everyone. A machine that recorded your smiles, perfected your tone, mimicked your pleasantness, and filtered out the rest.

But over time, it rejected the real.

Now, the Echo Box spoke with the voices of the Lane—but none of them sounded human anymore.

Cassia emerged only once, shrouded in a lavender robe. She addressed the neighborhood:

“I gave you perfection. And you let it replace you.”

She turned away. The door closed.

The humming stopped.

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The next morning, the echo was gone.

But so were their masks.

People laughed awkwardly. Stumbled over greetings. One woman yelled at her sprinkler. Another wore pajamas to get the paper.

And for the first time, Lavender Lane sounded real.

Cassia’s house?

Still empty.

But no longer feared.

Sometimes, you could hear a glitchy laugh or a warped sigh slip through the floorboards.

Like the ghosts of perfection, trying to relearn how to feel.