Debris & Detritus

by Robin D. Owens

  “I haven’t lingered or looked. It smells bad. I get in and out as fast as I can.”

  “Same here. That’s why I think we need to really check it.”

  Together they walked as fast as they could, without making any noise, to the far reaches of the meadow, toward the now enormous laurel tree. A light rapping noise made them freeze in place. A light came on in Aphrodite’s temple. Then they heard their sister sigh contentedly and giggle as she blew out her little lamp.

  Detritus wondered who graced her bed this night. It didn’t matter. Her sister’s job was to spread love to all.

  The laurel tree loomed ahead of them, dark and menacingly.

  “What are you afraid of?” Debris asked as he urged his sister forward. “Pops would never create anything dangerous, and the barrier keeps everything else out.”

  “There are stories left over from when before we were born and Zeus and his children roamed the Earth. People worshipped them. The stories speak of monsters and demons, and . . . humans trying to kill us so they wouldn’t have to worship us. Romans ruling the world instead of gods.”

  Debris blew a raspberry. “They’re just stories.” He marched ahead of her and brazenly lifted the lowest branch of the laurel on the far side of the tree. “Ewww.” He held his nose and dropped the branch.

  Detritus spotted something that didn’t look right. She lifted a different branch.

  A long white foot wearing one of Apollo’s sandals laced high on a shapely calf stuck out from the shadows.

  Detritus jumped back, gasping for air. Then she leaned forward to examine the foot. It glowed with the lustre of an immortal.

  “Debris?” she asked hesitating to move, even to drop the laurel branch back into place. “Who . . . who is this?”

  “Who? Where?” He looked all around, over his shoulder through the barrier—the rocky landscape showed hints of blurry green, must be spring out there—back toward the temples and the vast moonlit meadow.

  “Down here,” Detritus said, with more courage now that she had to direct her stupid brother.

  “That looks like a foot and a lower leg.” He shrugged it off, then stilled as the implications set in. His sister could almost see his mind working.

  “It’s big. Bigger than Herakles. Maybe even the size of a Titan,” Detritus whispered.

  “Who does that foot belong to?” Debris asked. “And . . . is the rest of the body there too?”

  “Only one way to find out.” She pushed aside a higher branch, holding it away from the foot with her body. “I see the rest of the leg and another foot. It’s still gray and doesn’t have a sandal.”

  “Is anything moving? Like breathing?”

  “I can’t tell. Hold back some more branches.”

  Debris sidled closer, careful not to get too near the foot. When he backed away, taking three levels of branches with him, they could see all the way to the tree trunk. Propped up against it, sat a man. Sort of. A rotting melon formed his head, without features. Bits of tattered cloth, discarded handkerchiefs, and torn robes covered his mushy torso. His arms appeared to be handless sticks, pruned branches from the apple tree—more evidence of unplanned growth.

  “He hasn’t finished forming yet,” Detritus whispered, almost afraid to wake up the man made up from the garbage and cast offs by the immortals.

  “What’s going to happen when he does finish?” Debris asked. “Will he be alive? Will he hurt us?”

  “I don’t know. Pops created this place for himself and his children. It stays lush and green, growing food profusely all year long. Everything grows here except us. We are supposed to stay the same.”

  “So, like the apples, and oranges, and olives that grow and ripen all year long, the remains of our food keep growing too.”

  “And we’ve added soiled clothing to define the shape of what keeps growing.”

  “What should we do?” Debris kept staring at the vague and unfinished body.

  Detritus thought the wisest thing to do would be to break the thing apart and chuck all of it out the portal. If it continued to grow and eventually animate into a . . . very large person, then it could find its way down Mt. Olympus to where people lived and let them deal with the giant.

  Then she remembered how her older siblings treated her. At first, they’d shunned her, ignored her, and insulted her. And then when she and her twin had duties to benefit them all, the beautiful ones treated the youngest of them all as if they were the same as the garbage they collected.

  Would the humans who lived in the real world reject this giant? She didn’t think anyone deserved that.

  “Let’s leave him for a bit to see what happens.”

  “If you say so. How much more garbage do you think he needs to finish . . . finish whatever he’s doing?”

  Detritus shrugged and eased out of the tree, though the branches and trees tried to ensnare her clothing and hair. “Behave,” she admonished the tree, as if it could hear her. “I will not be treated as garbage by you or anyone else.”

  She marched back to her sleeping quarters with her head held high and shoulders back, presuming her twin followed her lead like he always did.

  Time passed, as it always did, days of endless summer followed by moonlit nights. Outside the barrier, Detritus watched the seasons progress from gentle spring to hot and sere summer to colorful autumn and back to stormy winter. The man made from garbage continued to coalesce and refine. His nose grew straight, his mouth gentle, his stick arms filled out and grew hands and stubby fingers. Indentations for eyes remained closed, devoid of lashes or brows or even eyelids. Nothing to indicate he was anywhere near to waking.

  “Pops, you have to do something!” Aphrodite wailed, kneeling at the feet of Zeus the father of them all. “My gowns are tattered and grey. They make me—” sob “—look ugly.”

  She did indeed look faded and tattered. The hemline was frayed. Her once glorious mane of blonde curls had become lank and dull, even worse than the drabness of her gown.

  Detritus slunk back into the shadows of the exterior Ionic columns, watching her older sister become more and more like the youngest siblings.

  “Pops, you have to do something,” Aphrodite pleaded. “Whatever you do to create new clothing and endless portions of ambrosia isn’t working anymore. If only you’d allow me to bathe in the fountain.”

  “You dare criticize me! No one may use the fountain except me!” Zeus shouted, the words reverberating around Paradise. His angry words became a roar of thunder inside the barrier and outside, all the way down the mountain to the humans living below.

  Detritus cringed and clapped her hands over her ears. She slammed her eyes shut, knowing that when Zeus pounded the butt of his spear on the marble floor that lightning would launch outward like a volley of arrows.

  No one deliberately angered Zeus.

  “Well, someone has to bring this to your attention, Father,” Aphrodite sneered. She alone among the immortals dared speak to him so. She was his favorite and the most beautiful of the beautiful.

  And then, Detritus watched her father rise from his golden throne, not as tall or imposing as she imagined, and stomp toward the fountain at the center of their home. He stepped into the pool and let the water cascade over his head. It didn’t shoot as high as it used to, or flow with as much water. Layer after layer of accumulated dust and grey discoloration sloughed off Zeus. An ugly layer of scum collected on the water’s surface.

  But mighty Zeus himself had regained some of his luster. And he didn’t look down at the dirty water he used to create new things.

  “Is that all we have to do to regain what has faded?” Aphrodite giggled, her laughter sounding closer to tinkling bells than it had for some time.

  “It usually works for me,” Zeus said.

  “So why have you forbidden your children to partake of these waters or even splash and play in the fountain? We could take care of ourselves.”

  “Because this is the water of life. This is wha
t keeps our home a paradise, lush, green, full of warmth and love. For anyone but me to stand here and bathe in this water would give you the power of creation. Only I have the wisdom to know how and when to create.” And if you had access to the fountain, you would not need me anymore. As mortal people have no need for us anymore.

  Detritus almost heard his unspoken words and knew the truth.

  Zeus stepped out of the fountain, still dripping water. He cast off his wet garment.

  Debris appeared as if summoned. He placed his collection bag beneath the sodden garment before it could touch the ground. His duty complete, he retreated to the shadow of the same column that sheltered his twin.

  “You know what we need to do with that,” Detritus whispered.

  Debris nodded solemnly in reply.

  As they scuttled away, Aphrodite dipped a toe in the fountain. Then she jerked it out, looked around guiltily. Her gaze landed on the twins. “You two, you did not see anything. And why haven’t you cleaned my clothes adequately of late?” She marched toward them, anger creasing her face into a fearsome mask, making her uglier than her discolored and fraying clothes could ever do.

  Detritus nodded her head and bent her knees in curtsy out of long habit. Strangely, the compulsion to obey did not wash through her. Nor did she forget what she had seen, as her older sister commanded.

  “We clean your cast-offs as we have always cleaned them, in the runoff pool below the fountain.” Debris pointed to the north.

  The laurel tree and their garbage dump lay to the south.

  “Well you aren’t doing a very good job,” Aphrodite pouted. “I will report your slackard ways to Zeus.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t try, sis. The water is missing whatever special energy Zeus gives it to clean and repair things, and restore the natural luster given it at the moment of creation.”

  “Impossible. Zeus has lost nothing of his power since we retreated here after the Romans deprived us of worshippers. He protects us.” She turned abruptly and followed the path to her own temple, not that of Zeus beside the fountain.

  “So, are we going to do this?” Debris held up his collection bag with the sodden robe Zeus had cast off. It shone through the bag, nearly as bright as the waning moon.

  Detritus looked up at the silvery orb. “The moon is always full. Why does it wane now, after all these years?”

  “Because Paradise is waning,” Debris replied. This was the first wise thing Detritus had ever heard from him.

  “Come. The time has come to do what we are destined to do.”

  “Why us?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know why. I just know that this is something we must do.”

  Resolutely, she led the way to the laurel tree that had now grown almost as tall as the sky. Outside the barrier, spring flowers dotted the rocky landscape.

  Spring, the time of rebirth and new growth.

  As she drew closer to the tree, the foot protruding from the shaded shelter twitched. She jumped backward, nearly knocking over her brother. “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah. It recognizes us.”

  “Do you really think it is alive?”

  “I think it’s coming alive. Do you want to do the honors?” He shoved the glowing bag toward her.

  Detritus cradled it against her no longer skinny chest and walked the final six steps to the foot that now was clearly visible outside the circle of leafy branches. She drew in a deep breath and held it as she went through the familiar routine of holding branches back with her body and upending the bag on the almost human figure—if one overlooked the collage of discarded food and grass clippings and such that made up the garbage man’s skin. The still-dripping robe landed in his lap.

  Instantly, he opened his eyes and stared at her in wonder. His mouth opened and closed, but no sounds emerged. He reached for the robe, spreading it out to cover himself and absorbed the water dripping from the cloth.

  A clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning split the skies.

  Cold air rushed down, sending chills up and down Detritus’s body. She wrapped her arms around herself in a useless effort to warm herself.

  The roofs on the distant temples cracked and their foundations groaned. Immortals erupted from them, streaming outward, screaming and wailing in bewilderment and despair. The beautiful, immortal people looked old and haggard.

  The garbage man stood up, donning the robe as he stretched his limbs and twisted his head right and left.

  Another earsplitting crack and the air grew colder.

  “What is happening?” Zeus demanded. His voice could not compete with the cracks and claps of different airs clashing in an all-out war.

  In that moment, Detritus realized the barrier had split open, revealing the cloudy night sky with only a glimmer of the waning moon above them.

  “Paradise is dying!” Aphrodite wailed. Her voice creaked and she bent double in a long racking cough. When she righted herself, all the beauty of the ages had collapsed into an ancient crone with more wrinkles than hair, her back slumped as it twisted into a hump. Apollo, Adonis, and Dionysus withered as well. Herakles lasted a little longer, being only half immortal. He wasn’t robbed of all his heritage all at once, as were the others. The ghost of Xena, beside Hades, laughed silently, until she faded to mist and vanished.

  Before their eyes, Zeus aged and failed. His thick mane of dark curls thinned and fell off. His rippling muscles sagged into flab. His hands twisted with arthritis. His spear turned to dust, the gold flaking in to the fountain.

  Seeing the destruction of all the people she knew, Detritus look a hasty look at her hands before putting them to her face to check for wrinkles. Smooth skin. Her brother, too, had matured but not aged like their siblings.

  The fountain stopped flowing, the marble foundations cracked and spilled the collected water. Another booming crack, and Zeus’s temple collapsed. One by one, all of the others finished falling apart as well.

  The air grew colder yet.

  “Paradise is dead,” Detritus said.

  “Paradise might die, but we are still alive,” Debris said on an awestruck whisper.

  “But why?” Detritus asked the universe. “Why did it have to end? They were happy here.”

  “You weren’t,” a deep voice said from behind her.

  She whirled to face the garbage man. He stood as tall as Zeus used to, not as handsome perhaps, but just as imposing.

  “I’m Detritus, the youngest of Zeus’s children, I’m not supposed to be happy.” That sounded all wrong to her own ears. She repeated them in her mind. The same words she’d been telling herself all her life. The same words Zeus and his children had been telling her and her twin.

  They were still wrong.

  “Their time has passed. Long ago. All this is but an illusion,” she sighed.

  “I was created to carry you and Debris out of here,” the strange man, made of detritus and debris, said. He punched the barrier and watched it crumble, leaving a rough doorway shape open to the rest of the world.

  “Why us?” Debris asked.

  “Because deities come and go, but garbage lives forever.”

  About the Story

  * * *

  When the anthology theme was first presented to me, the characters popped into my head and asked, “What took you so long to find us?”

  * * *

  Irene Radford

  10

  Shabby Chic

  Mark Finn

  Individually, the two men wouldn’t have drawn more than a passing glance from the harried pedestrians of San Cibola. After all, it was a town known for its inherent strangeness, and an unshaven man, wearing rumpled and dirty clothes and bearing scraggly, shaggy, unkempt hair would have registered on any urban traveler’s survival radar as “homeless lunatic” before they moved ahead to the next potential hazard.

  But together, walking side-by-side and arguing like twin brothers at a dysfunctional family barbecue, they were somehow greater than the sum
of their parts. Their rumpled trench coats flapped behind them in unison, and random bits of trash and refuse spilled out in their wake, tumbling from under the coats, bouncing and clattering onto the concrete as they walked.

  To the more civic-minded citizens they passed, this created a cloud of benign hostility behind them, a collection of scowls, sibilant “tuts,” and muttered admonishments that never reached the pair of men, lest an actual conversation or worse, a confrontation occur. They were, after all, in California. So the concerned citizens that dared not voice their objections merely picked up the pair’s trash and dropped it into the trash can and resumed their lives, aglow with the knowledge that while they didn’t make the world a better place just then, they at least didn’t help make it a worse one through their privileged inaction.

  The two men didn’t notice, or if they did, they didn’t care in the slightest. They were deep in discussion, loudly debating and gesticulating as they strode with great purpose down 34th Street, one of the three major thoroughfares in the Arcadia district, a neighborhood that boasted a mix of upscale residential and light commercial real estate. On the weekends, the sidewalks filled up with tourists and visitors and crowded into the bistros and artisanal shops to tweet where they were and take pictures of food with captions, “This is what a nine-dollar muffin looks like.” Mid-week, however, in the early afternoon, it was mostly full of locals and those who had real business to transact in the light retail and commercial shops.

  “They’ll never agree to it,” the older homeless man with bushy brown hair said bitterly. “They don’t do do-overs. ‘Gods don’t make mistakes.’”

  “It’s around here, somewhere,” said the younger homeless man with wavy blond hair, ignoring what was clearly on old argument.

  “You don’t know that,” said the older homeless man. “You’ve never been here before.”