Debris & Detritus

by Robin D. Owens

  If Griff had bothered to look behind him at the building, he’d have seen it glowing like a jewel box—stunning cobalt blues on the outer walls, pristine white trim, perfectly gorgeous windows that led to rooms so welcoming, you’d have sworn some master interior designer had plucked your favorite style from your mind and strewn it before you like diamonds. Griff, frankly, was sick of this shit and wanted to kill them both.

  It was nigh on impossible to kill demi-gods. He’d tried for a few centuries, so he should know.

  “Do you think, dear boy, that she’ll stir up quite a lot of trouble?” Debris asked him, and Griff ignored him.

  “It’s going to be a blast, either way,” Detritis said, and he was probably composing some song or ode to the impending disaster. Just another one to add to the thousands he’d accumulated.

  Griff’s anger raged beneath the surface because he knew they didn’t care. Miranda was alone, out there in the world again, and they were going to enjoy the apocalypse from a front row seat, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

  “Yes,” Debris agreed with his partner, smiling into his tea. “Yes, quite.”

  They watched as Miranda hiked up her backpack, which held most of her worldly goods, her violin case in one hand, the sword now appearing as a parasol dangling off her other side. Oh dear Jupiter, she didn’t even know to put it on the correct side where she could get to it quickly with her right hand.

  “Please try not to kill her again so soon,” Debris added, almost as an afterthought, but Griff knew nothing Debris said was an afterthought. “It’s so delicious to watch this, knowing now she’s found the sword. She hasn’t found it all of the other times.”

  “How many thousands?” Detritus asked him.

  Griff continued to ignore them both, watching her disappear into the crowd on Royal.

  “Oh, hundreds of thousands. I’ve lost track of the millennia. You’re getting soft, Griff,” Debris teased. “You never let her live long enough to get close to the sword before. What’s changed, I wonder?”

  He didn’t answer. He sat like a gargoyle on the balustrade, watching her, knowing his other half walked away into certain death. And if she managed to live, he would have to kill her again.

  He was so tired of having to kill her.

  She’d made him promise. All those millennia ago. Part of him wanted to let her live long enough to remember him, to remember that damned promise, just so he could strangle her for having made him make it.

  Part of him knew she’d been absolutely right to do so.

  Why had things changed this time?

  Griff didn’t know. He couldn’t put it into words.

  Loathing, perhaps. Loathing of what little of himself he had left.

  Maybe that’s all it was.

  It sure as hell wasn’t hope. He knew better.

  About the Story

  * * *

  One of the best things about dear friends who are also writers is that they understand your particular brand of Crazy. One of the worst things is that they generally encourage it. Pooks knew I’d been noodling with a fantasy dragon series. Something fun and action-y and crazy and set where I live, in the French Quarter, and then she upped the Crazy by suggesting I add these two not-quite-prime-time Greek Gods to the mix. All I had were the names, and they popped to life for me and were absolutely perfect for the story. That almost never happens with others’ suggestions. (Thank goodness Pooks isn’t into pushing crack, or I’d be a goner.)

  What you see here is pulled from what will be the book. Join my newsletter to receive exclusive offers, snippets, and general fun news, including contests.

  * * *

  Toni McGee Causey

  9

  Garbage In, Monsters Out

  Irene Radford

  Detritus scurried behind her older sister Aphrodite across the manicured lawns of Mt. Olympus. Aphrodite discarded an orange peel without looking at the “No Littering” sign Zeus had placed deliberately along the path his divine daughters and immortal sons usually walked, neatly circumventing the sacred fountain at the center. When that didn’t keep the lovely children from dropping food, used handkerchiefs, decorative shawls, and feathers from their headdresses, Zeus assigned his youngest children, the half-mortal twins Detritus and Debris, to pick up after their older siblings.

  “Spoiled brat,” Debris whispered to his sister, younger by two minutes and therefore inferior to his superior knowledge of their world.

  Aphrodite had to have heard his comment. Instead of acknowledging the insult, she waved joyfully at Apollo, just coming off his chariot ride across the skies. He slapped his driving gloves and gauntlets together and tossed them vaguely in the direction of the twins.

  “That’s debris,” Detritus told her brother. “They need to be saved, cleaned, and put where he can find them again.”

  Debris shrugged. “Here comes Herakles and his apple core. That’s yours.” He ducked the flying bit of garbage so his sister could catch it in her drawstring bag and not have to touch it. Aphrodite wasn’t so polite. She dropped the rest of her orange peel off to the far side of the path, sending Detritus scurrying to pick it up.

  “How come we get stuck with the suckiest job Pops could think up?” Debris grumbled.

  “Because by the time we were born, he’d run out of beauty to bestow upon us. We’re the youngest and the ugliest, therefore we are garbage and thrown away,” Detritus replied.

  “We never had garbage before the Romans drove us out of Greece to this refuge,” Aphrodite said. “We had mortal servants happy to pick up after us. It was getting pretty ripe around here before you two came along to help us out.”

  “At least now we have a job instead of drifting about doing nothing. Pops can’t deny us a fair share of ambrosia anymore,” Debris said, looking toward the athletic field where Herakles showed Hades the fine points of a discus throw. The ghost of Xena looked on, tut-tutting at every mistake.

  “We get a servant’s portion, not a family-sized bowl.” Detritus stared at Aphrodite’s handkerchief. The goddess of love, the epitome of beauty, had blown her nose on the fragile piece of woven cotton with a needle lace trim.

  Detritus wondered if the immortals ever had to blow their noses in the before times or if her sister did this just to make more work for the unappreciated twins.

  “Hey, sis, you dropped something,” Detritus called after Aphrodite.

  “Go trip over it,” Aphrodite sneered. Then she smiled up at Apollo, and the entire world stopped breathing in awe. The sun, Helios, froze in place at the horizon, lingering to limn her in glorious light.

  Sure enough, a compulsion to obey washed through Detritus, and she politely tripped over the fragile scrap of cloth. Mud and grass stained her chiton, her knees, and her chin before she could right herself.

  Debris laughed raucously, pointing a finger at her supine figure. Their divine siblings tittered as well.

  “I’m going to get you for that. All of you,” Detritus snarled.

  “Shshsh,” Debris hissed at his twin. “This is a good gig. We don’t want to get Pops angry. He’ll give this job to someone else!” He delicately retrieved the soiled hankie and put in his recycling bag. He’d wash, dry, and press it along with other debris cast off by his siblings.

  “Who else would take this lousy job?” Detritus snarled. She brushed off grass blades from her short draperies. She’d scraped her knees, and her jaw ached from having bumped her chin, and she’d bit the inside of her cheek, and it bled onto her teeth. Now she was truly the ugliest of them all. She grabbed her collection bag and stomped toward the edge of the warm pocket of paradise Zeus had created for their playground. Playground, humph! Everyone else did as they pleased. Detritus and Debris had to work day in, day out.

  At the edge of the green, lush growth, she paused and braced herself for the worst part of her job. All she had to do was close her eyes and think about a door leading outward. A portal would appear in mid-air. Easy for t
he other immortals, if they thought of a need to exit Paradise. So far, no one else had thought up a reason. Detritus was always exhausted when she did this. She waited until the end of the day so she only had to do it once.

  Then, when she had an opening into the rest of the world, she must thrust her arm out into the frigid air of the mountaintop and upend her collection bag. Two minutes’ work.

  Two minutes of bone-numbing cold. On top of bone-numbing exhaustion.

  It was snowing out there in the world of mortals. Snow blowing nearly sideways and piling up into huge drifts. She could barely see the outlines of stunted trees only a few yards away from the portal.

  “Just this once, I’ll wait. Maybe it will be warmer tomorrow.” Determinedly she looked around to make sure she was alone and unobserved. Some of the cold leaked through the barrier. None of the beautiful children of Zeus would come this close to reality to notice. Detritus upended the bag behind a laurel tree. “We’ll see how long that takes to smell up the old place.”

  Whistling a jaunty tune of defiance, she returned to the open meadow, where daisies bloomed eternally and butterflies flitted about to the delight of the immortals.

  “Detritus,” Debris said on a relieved sigh. “Apollo’s gloves are hopelessly stained. You know how he is, always demanding the most pristine accoutrements. There is no way even Pops could get out these stains. They look like he dipped them into a tar pit,” he wailed.

  “Does he have other white gloves and gauntlets?” the younger twin asked.

  “Of course he does. Dozens of pairs. I don’t even know if he knows how many pairs he has, only that it’s supposed to be my job to retrieve them, clean them, and place them back in the temple where they belong.”

  “Well, if he won’t miss them, then throw them away,” Detritus replied, quite annoyed at her brother’s inability to think beyond the narrow dictates of their father’s instructions.

  “Where? Do you know what they’ll do to us if anyone finds them? We’ll lose our jobs. We won’t get any ambrosia. We’ll become—” he gulped and his throat apple bobbed in his skinny teenage neck “—we’ll become mortals.” He blanched with dread.

  “I’ll show you.” She led him toward the barrier but didn’t stop at the portal. A dozen yards to the right, still close to the invisible wall, she found the laurel tree with its thick and spreading branches. She lifted one of them to where she’d earlier dumped the garbage. The sweet smell of fresh oranges wafted upward. The spiral peel rested on top of other bits and pieces of discarded food. Had it been so big and substantial a few moments ago? Or smelled so strongly? Sweet it might be, but not this overwhelming. Apollo’s white kidskin gloves should cover it and mask the perfume. Apollo had big hands.

  Still, the gloves barely obscured the peel and the apple core and other garbage.

  Over the next several years, the autumnal and winter storms outside raged with increasing intensity. Spring and summer passed without comment.

  The cycle of life continued inside as it always had, with little or no change anywhere. Who knew what happened beyond the barrier. Were the dreaded Romans still in power over Greece?

  Detritus continued to dump her garbage beneath the laurel tree. Debris added more and more of the discards of the immortal children of Zeus. The pile grew. And so did the tree, while all the others remained the same size. Even the grass failed to grow and need mowing.

  The fountain continued to gush upward and flow downward. The overflow channeled off into a stunted copse, where it pooled and Debris washed the soiled artifacts of his siblings.

  The sweet perfume of fresh oranges grew sour. The twins had to hold their noses whenever they approached the dump. But a few feet away, beyond the protective branches of the laurel, they smelled only the usual mix of flowers and trees that never died, never withered, never discarded their leaves. Never grew. Only the laurel tree changed. And the fountain flowed.

  “Pops wants to see you,” Apollo said, one evening, staring down at the unwanted twins.

  Detritus bobbed a curtsey to her older brother.

  “Did he say why?” Debris asked. He didn’t dip his head or salute or anything. Unheard of! The compulsion of respect hadn’t compelled Detritus’s curtsey. Only long habit.

  Detritus cringed behind Debris, not willing to be caught in Apollo’s wrath at this lack of respect. She didn’t think he deserved anything more than what one immortal owed another, but he thought all of the Olympians should grovel at his feet.

  “How am I supposed to know?” He tossed another pair of soiled gloves at Debris, expecting the boy to catch them and deal with the filth that might infect all of Mt. Olympus if left untended. “He spoke, I heard, I passed on the message, though someone else should have that lowly job.” He moved away to perform whatever duties he had. Did he even know why he drove his bright chariot across the skies every day?

  “Whatever he wants, it won’t be good for you two. You were born to do all the dirty work, including be the brunt of his temper. He’s been throwing tantrums a lot lately,” Herakles said coming up behind the bright and shining Apollo.

  When they had both passed out of sight and earshot, Detritus smoothed her freshly washed chiton. It looked grey rather than white, no matter what she did to cleanse it. The washing pool had grown colder and didn’t clean as well as it should. Her face also had a permanent streak of dirt across her nose and down her cheek.

  Debris smoothed his hair. A cowlick stuck up at the crown of his head, despite repeated attempts to tame his mane. He, too, had developed the dark stains across his nose and on the opposite cheek as his twin.

  Inside the largest marble temple on the mountain, Zeus looked as he always looked, tall, broad-shouldered, strong, and imposing with jet black curly hair and full beard. He sat forward on his golden throne, bracing a golden spear against the ground as if ready to leap into action.

  Was that grey salting his hair and beard? Detritus thought her father looked older. No, never that. More mature. He was immortal, after all. As were they all. But his long white and gold robes looked a bit tarnished.

  Everything within Mt. Olympus had faded from pristine and glowing white to dustier shades. But the change had been so gradual, Detritus didn’t think anyone had noticed.

  She gave her father a full and respectful bow. So did Debris.

  “You two are doing a marvelous job at keeping our home and refuge clean. I award you an extra portion of ambrosia tonight and every night. You may return to your duties with the full knowledge that your loyalty and good service are appreciated.” The elder god dipped his spear tip in dismissal.

  The twins backed out of the temple, never turning their backs on Zeus the almighty.

  “He never noticed our good work when we dumped stuff outside the barrier,” Detritus mumbled once they were free of their father’s exclusive enclave.

  “Maybe because we aren’t opening the portal, even when it’s summer outside, and therefore keeping all the warmth and beauty inside,” Debris said.

  “Maybe. I’m going to enjoy my ambrosia as long as it lasts.” She had an awful feeling, like a vast emptiness in the pit of her tummy that something awful, or very exciting, was about to disrupt the same old same old routine of immortality.

  Years passed. The trees and grass and flowers lost some luster. The temples began to sag.

  Detritus noticed a haze in the air.

  “Yeah, it’s there,” Debris admitted to her. “Sort of like an orange mist in the distance. But up close, everything looks the same.”

  But it didn’t.

  Later, while Mt. Olympus slept and the moon hung motionless in the sky, Detritus crept out of her little bed—she was always a young teen, never aging—to see what about Mt. Olympus was different, damaged. Dangerous.

  The night air chilled Detritus more than she thought necessary. Part of living in Paradise was the comfort of constant temperatures. It was always sunny in Paradise. If it ever rained, that happened at night, replenishing
the plants without disturbing the immortals. The difference between night and day should only be enough to require the comfort of a light blanket for sleeping. She wished she had something warm to cover her toes within her sandals.

  “I’ll make this quick and be back inside before anyone discovers I’m gone.”

  “Wrong,” Debris said from right behind her. “I heard you leave. Where are we going?”

  Detritus shrugged. “Something is not right. I figured now would be a better time to discover it than during the day, when everyone watches us.”

  “No one watches us. We are beneath their notice unless something goes wrong, and then they blame us, even if it isn’t our fault.”

  “True. But I think something is really, really, really wrong. If we don’t find out what and fix it, then everyone will find out and maybe kick us off Mt. Olympus.” That had happened before. Long, long ago. She couldn’t remember who. But her siblings only spoke of it in fearful whispers. She thought it had something to do with a Roman spy, but she could be wrong.

  “Well what is different?” Debris asked. He looked taller in the moonlight, with broader shoulders and the hint of a dark beard. He was growing up. Immortals didn’t do that. Zeus needed his youngest children to be teenagers forever. They should stay teenagers forever.

  A quick glance at her own silhouetted shadow and she saw the willowy curves of a young woman. An illusion of moonlight and shadow, she told herself.

  She wasn’t convinced. Now was not the time to discuss that change. Better to show her brother though he wouldn’t see anything but the most obvious.

  “The luster is gone.”

  He scratched his head. “Now that you point it out . . . yeah. How come white clothing, white marble temples, even white leather doesn’t glow anymore?”

  “The only thing that we’ve done differently is to not open a portal when we dump the garbage. Have you noticed the pile lately? Have you seen how big it is growing? Could it be draining Mt. Olympus of whatever makes things glow?”