Debris & Detritus

by Robin D. Owens

  “But look at this! There’s no fire, no brimstone!”

  “Well, wasn’t that all hot and stinky anyway?” Zeus looked at the twins. “What did you do with the fire and brimstone?”

  “We have all that routed into the saunas now,” Detritus said proudly. “All those renewable, reusable resources were going to waste. And if the immortals don’t set the example . . . ”

  “Gah!” Hades couldn’t get any words out. “What’s going on with the souls doomed to Tartarus? You never told me what you did with them. Where are they? It’s too quiet in here.”

  “Oh, we’ve put them on a rotating schedule. The noise was just awful, all that weeping and gnashing of teeth. Just awful. Had to go,” Detritus said. “So we’ve taken care of that. The souls are either in the HDTV theater watching endless reruns of Gilligan’s Island or being the animatronic children in the Small World ride at Disney World. They were just cluttering up the place hanging out here, anyway.”

  Hades screamed.

  “There goes that vein again. I hope you do better with whatever comes out than I did. Athena’s a real handful. And those weapons and armor of hers really hurt.” Zeus rubbed his own forehead as he looked around some more. “I don’t see the problem here, Hades. It seems like they’re doing a great job getting this place clean and organized. Olympus has been a paradise since they got done with it.”

  Hades felt his eyes go so wide, he thought they’d pop right out of their sockets. “You’ve got to be kidding. How many times do I have to say it before it gets through to you people? This is the Underworld! It’s not supposed to be a paradise. Why is this concept so hard for people to comprehend? I thought it was pretty clear!”

  Hades thought his head was finally going to explode until he realized Zeus wasn’t kidding. He grabbed Zeus’ arm and dragged him out of Tartarus. He didn’t stop until they were in Hades’ receiving room, where he had to blink in the brightness of the lights.

  “Why in the Underworld is it so bright in here?” Hades demanded at the top of his lungs.

  “Oh, that would be the lights reflecting off the Hell’s Bells,” Debris answered.

  Hades whirled, not realizing the twins had followed them. “What did you do? What. Did. You. Do?”

  “We polished the Bells, and it’s about time, too. It doesn’t look like they had been cleaned since the beginning of time. Now, they’re shiny new.”

  Hades turned to Zeus, eyes flashing with psychotic rage. “Get rid of them, Zeus! I’m telling you, if you don’t, I’m going to commit deicide! Put them among the mortals if you have to, but get them out of here!”

  “Come on, Hades, I don’t see the problem here,” Zeus said.

  “I’m getting really tired of repeating myself, Zeus! The Underworld is supposed to be ugly and dirty and nasty. We have an image to maintain, and it’s not this! The poster boys for Scrubbing Bubbles don’t have any place in my realm! How are souls supposed to abandon hope if the Gates have flowerbeds around them and the Guardians of the Underworld wear ribbons and bows?”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so mean,” Detritus said in a huff. “We were just doing what we were born to do! Weren’t we, Zeus?”

  Hades didn’t wait for Zeus to answer. “Get rid of them, Zeus, before I go totally insane, and I don’t think this world is prepared for that!”

  He saw the possibilities whirl through Zeus’ eyes and finally click. “That would be worse than Hera on a bad day, wouldn’t it?”

  “Think every bad monster movie ever made from every culture gone crazy at the same time, live and in person.” Hades’s calm, even tone was scarier than his shouting. “Teenagers running in high heels, the pointless screaming, going through obvious doors with death behind them, stupidity running rampant . . . ”

  Zeus waved him down. “I get the picture, Hades. You’ve made your point.” He turned to the twin deities. “Pack up your squeegees, boys, we’re going back to Olympus.”

  “But we’re not through here!”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” Hades lunged for their necks. “One way or another, you’re out of here!”

  Zeus grabbed Hades before he could reach the two lesser gods. They looked at him in uncomprehending horror. Then, as they realized their peril, they broke and ran.

  Hades herded all three unwanted guests out of the Underworld ten minutes later. Just as soon as they were out of sight, he sighed deeply in relief and turned back. He took great pleasure in slamming the Gates closed behind him. His first step on the road to normalcy was to rip the ribbons off Cerberus’s multiple necks. The Hellhound thumped his tails gratefully, leading Hades to scratch behind one set of ears.

  “I have to admit you do smell better.” Hades stopped and shook his head. “No! I’m not going to find the good in this.”

  Hades let Persephone rub the tension out of his shoulders and temples when he finally went to bed that night. When he was just about to drift off to sleep, he heard her say softly, “You know, a housekeeper’s not such a bad thing. Maybe we can get them to come back once a week or so.”

  Hades sat bolt upright, screaming.

  About the Story

  * * *

  “Queer Eye for the Dead Guy” has been one of the most amazing journeys of my writing career. If you read the Foreword, you’ll see we’ve had quite the road to here. It’s a tribute to humor, to people now gone, and frankly is kinda the basis for my part of Redheads of the Apocalypse. Find out more about the journey, the stories behind the stories, at my website.

  * * *

  Rhonda Eudaly

  8

  Used Goods

  Toni McGee Causey

  It was a routine day inside the skinny three-story building that housed the Used Goods store near the heart of the French Quarter . . . until the sword starting singing to Miranda.

  Swords did not ordinarily sing to her, you see, and this just would not do. A customer might come in and hear it. People were usually rattled when they stepped inside, compelled, she had begun to suspect, by something they didn’t understand, and a singing sword was just one notch of crazy too far for many of them to handle.

  She told the sword to hush, but the sword kept singing.

  Off key.

  It really was quite irritating. People passing right there on the sidewalk would sometimes pause, confused, looking straight into the little bay window displays that Griff had set up, baffled by the terrible singing, she supposed, not guessing it came from the sword in the window. Not that all of them could even see the window, but that was another bag of worms entirely.

  Miranda dusted the haphazardly stacked merchandise on the back wall behind the counter, wary of the little tin soldier who liked to try to stab her with his bayonet when she wasn’t looking. She couldn’t prove he was trying to actually stab her. She just kept finding him awfully close to her arm with his bayonet positioned menacing-like, even when she would have sworn he was on a different shelf not five minutes earlier.

  “Not today, Lt. Birnbaum,” she told the little soldier as she swiped over him with her feather duster, because it was just ever-so-slightly easier to think she hadn’t completely lost her mind if these things had names. “Maybe tomorrow you’ll have better luck. Off you go, back in your box.” And she scooted him back into the tattered Birnbaum Shaving Kit box where she’d first found him and Griff had said he was supposed to stay, but apparently, Lt. Birnbaum had felt quite differently.

  The sword in the window sang a little louder, somehow more irritatingly out of tune, though it might have been aiming for some sort of Irish ballad, so maybe it was singing it correctly.

  “Please stop it,” she told it again, and it ignored her. Again.

  “Under no circumstances are you to touch the weapons,” Griff had warned her on her first day. “Never. Ever. For any reason. Not even a little bit. I will know, and you will lose your job immediately.”

  “If you don’t stop it,” she told the sword, “I’m going to tell Mr. Warm-and-Fuzzy. May
be he has a nice vault somewhere.”

  The sword got a little quieter, though it didn’t cease altogether. She rolled her eyes and hoped no one came in and complained about the noise.

  Of course, customers rarely wandered in, at least not of their own volition. Which was weird. She had no idea how the store managed to stay in business.

  The front of the store looked all of its 200 plus years in age—paint of an indeterminable color had faded and flaked off to the point where most of the original stucco was exposed, grayed from dirt and grime. The building might have once been glorious with its balconies (two floors of them) and wrought iron balustrades, but now it only sagged there like a once-formally dressed old lady who’d been struck with leprosy and only wore rags.

  In other words, it was exactly the kind of place tourists looked for and swarmed like gnats. She checked the doorknob to make sure it was unlocked.

  Yep. Definitely unlocked. Not a single customer all week.

  She glanced back at the stack of thingamabobs she’d just dusted, and she blinked. Every item was in a different place than they’d been five minutes earlier.

  “It’s not like I actually plan for the weird things to happen,” she told the fat little elf statue that clutched a four-leaf clover over his head as if hiding from the world. If she tried to remember what she’d thought he’d clutched yesterday, she’d have said a gold ball—clearly her powers of observation were on the fritz, or there was another one of those figurines around the store somewhere. “Odd things just happen around me. It’s not my fault, right?”

  She could have sworn, for just a split second, that the elf shrugged.

  The sword got shriller, though she hadn’t thought it possible.

  “No kidding,” she said, stomping over to the display in the bay window, “I may not be able to touch you, but I can surely find some sort of tongs and use those to toss you into the oven. There’s a kiln just two blocks over.”

  The sword switched to something that sounded like a fight song, but the volume had gone down a couple of notches. If she had to guess, she’d say it was seething, which really, that was nonsense. It was an inanimate object.

  Inanimate objects do not seethe.

  Honestly, this was more crazy than even she was used to. Maybe the shrinks had been right all those times they tried to put her on medication when she was in the foster care system.

  But some of the meds made her quite sick, and the rest knocked her out for entire days. She couldn’t finish school, sleeping her life away, and she couldn’t get a job, or get out of the foster homes, if she stayed sick. Sometimes the side effects had been hideous, like hives and swelling and horrible acne, though she didn’t tell a single soul about the one time she developed something that she swore to herself looked like scales. Actual scales. Which probably explained her addiction to cheap body lotion that she smeared all over her arms when she felt herself beginning to lose it.

  She looked down and realized she was holding the lotion bottle right now that was usually tucked in her pocket, smearing like crazy, covering her arms.

  Damned singing sword.

  She’d first been aware that the store was stalking her three weeks ago.

  It was her second year of living on the streets. She’d gotten out of jail after a slight misunderstanding over who exactly possessed the jewelry she’d been found to be carrying while traipsing out of a house where she’d not—strictly—been invited to visit.

  In all of the times she’d stood on that corner, trying hard to play her slightly battered, wholly stolen violin for money and passing up opportunities to pick the pockets of lazy tourists, there had never been a skinny, three-story building facing her from across the street.

  She’d been playing some random piece that came into her head—it was always some random piece of music that wouldn’t let her be, so she might as well make a few bucks off it—when between one blink and the next, the store was there with a battered sign in the window that read:

  DEBRIS & DETRITUS

  USED GOODS

  She’d stopped playing and stared, and a honeymooning couple who’d been listening to her threw her worried glances, along with a five into her hat, and she didn’t even bend down to grab it and shove it in her pocket, lest the gutter punks snatch it and run with it like they had last week.

  Miranda might only be twenty-three in physical years, but she was at least forty on the street and had seen more crazy than anyone ought to, and even that didn’t seem to brace her for the surprise of a building being where it was clearly not supposed to have been.

  There were now seven buildings on the block, when there had only been six before. It didn’t have an address on the front, which, really, how silly of them, and she wondered what type of Used Goods they sold.

  Not that she had any money for that nonsense, because she was barely holding her own at the shelter as it was. People didn’t know how much it cost to be homeless. People were right daft sometimes.

  Miranda had shaken herself from her reverie, picked up the tune where she left off, and when she was done, glanced back over, and the storefront . . . was gone.

  She blinked, closed her eyes, and then looked again, but nope, the street was perfectly normal. Well, as normal as the French Quarter gets.

  It happened again the next day. She’d riffed on a song, thrown in something random, then realized the building had appeared. This time, sporting a HELP WANTED sign.

  She was standing on a different street corner than the day before.

  Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, and by the end of the song, it was gone again. Her playing suffered, because it was just a little difficult, you might agree, to concentrate on playing well when a building was pranking you and you were wondering if you wandered into an ER, if they’d bother giving you an MRI or skip all the paperwork and just go ahead and ship you off to the crazy ward. Probably the crazy ward, since she didn’t have insurance, she decided, and so she packed up everything, determined to look unruffled, and sauntered back to the homeless shelter. She hung out a couple of hours before they opened for the night, listening to the others to see if anyone else had noticed anything weird.

  After overhearing three conversations about sparkly aliens and another guy talking (to himself) about how dinosaurs needed to quit stealing his blankets, Miranda gave up hoping for enlightenment.

  She refused to look at any of the buildings.

  The third day, when the building appeared between two famous restaurants that Miranda knew actually shared a wall, she wasted no time. She needed money, and she wasn’t letting some stupid stalker of a junk shop screw with her again.

  She cut her song right there in the middle, scooped up her hat and her violin case, and marched past two corners——one with a sax player who made her want to linger and one with a short, drunk guy laying out knives to juggle that she carefully avoided—until she finally found another unoccupied corner.

  She set out her hat, primed her violin, and started playing.

  Miranda felt it before she saw it: like ants crawling into her hairline.

  When she looked up again, mid-song, the blasted Used Goods storefront had followed her.

  She was being stalked by a skinny-ass building that didn’t—couldn’t—exist.

  The July heat was scorching, and she was surely coming down with something. Insanity, probably. She ignored it, and then when she looked again, the HELP WANTED sign was back, with a big sign next to it:

  Yes, you, Miranda.

  “That’s not even funny,” she muttered under her breath.

  It’s kinda funny.

  . . . the sign read, and when she blinked again . . .

  You’ve passed the interview.

  “Oh, hell, no, I haven’t,” she grumbled, flinging everything into the fiddle case, her head bent over it.

  The sign stretched so low, it almost skimmed the sidewalk, where she couldn’t help but see it.

  1 bedroom apartment

  Food
r />   Clothes

  Low pay (hey, you can’t have everything)

  Apply within.

  She stared for all of two seconds before she irritably hiked up the case and stomped across the street.

  “You should have said so in the first place,” she muttered as she stormed through the door.

  She waited at a filthy counter for more than an hour, and when Griff showed up, hostile and snarling, he said, “Well, I guess I don’t have any choice about it. You’re hired.”

  He looked as mean as he sounded; tall, with a craggy face that looked rock-hard and angry.

  “Really. And here I thought it was just me who had no choice in the matter.”

  “Clean up. Everything.” He glanced around as if really noticing it for the first time. “That should keep you busy.”

  She looked over the massive stacks of antiques, bric-a-brac, and items so long past their usefulness date they were practically moldering on the spot. There was so much dust and grime that a backhoe would be necessary.

  “You’re kidding,” she deadpanned. “I can see why sales are so brisk.”

  “If a customer comes in, be polite, but do not sell them anything unless I say it’s okay. We don’t sell stuff.”

  “But . . . this is a store, right? Not a museum.”

  “Of course it is,” he muttered, as if just now discovering that fact.

  “Well, here’s a nutty thought: if we sold some of this stuff, it would be a lot cleaner in here.”

  He looked back at her, and she almost could have sworn his face looked like . . . actual granite . . . and there was this strange hush in the place, as if all sound had drowned.

  “We don’t sell things to just anyone,” he said, revising. “I decide who, what, and when. Not you. You shouldn’t even be in here, but that decision’s out of my hands. So clean.”