Debris & Detritus Read online

  Debris & Detritus

  The Lesser Greek Gods Running Amok

  Edited by

  Patricia Burroughs

  Foreword by

  Rhonda Eudaly

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. The Night I Shot Johnny Valentine

  2. That Sweetest Cup

  3. Expense Claims Are Hell

  4. Chaos, Inc.

  5. HeartStones

  6. Small Gods

  7. Queer Eye for the Dead Guy

  8. Used Goods

  9. Garbage In, Monsters Out

  10. Shabby Chic

  11. The Bovines of Bybanos

  12. Sweet Dirty Love

  13. The Groom Wore Wings

  14. By Any Other Name

  15. Realms

  Afterword

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  About the Cover

  About Story Spring Publishing

  Copyrights

  Debris & Detritus: Greek Gods Running Amok copyright © Patricia Burroughs, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below:

  Story Spring Publishing, LLC

  3420 Veterans Drive, #325

  Pekin, IL 61554

  * * *

  “The Night I Shot Johnny Valentine” copyright © 2017 by Max Adams

  “That Sweetest Cup” copyright © 2017 by Michelle Muenzler

  “Expense Claims are Hell” copyright © 2017 by Antioch Grey

  “Chaos, Inc.” copyright © 2017 by Claire M. Johnson

  “HeartStones” copyright © 2017 by Robin D. Owens

  “Small Gods” copyright © 2017 by ChandaElaine Spurlock

  “Queer Eye for the Dead Guy” copyright © 2017 by Rhonda Eudaly

  “Used Goods” copyright © 2017 by Toni McGee Causey

  “Garbage In, Monsters Out” copyright © 2017 by Irene Radford

  “Shabby Chic” copyright © 2017 by Mark Finn

  “The Bovines of Bybanos” copyright © 2017 by MJ Butler

  “Sweet Dirty Love” copyright © 2017 by Jeanne Lyet Gassman

  “The Groom Wore Wings” copyright © 2017 by Melanie Fletcher

  “By Any Other Name” copyright © 2017 by Weyodi

  “Realms” copyright © 2017 by Beth Teliho

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the authors’ imaginations. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  * * *

  Cover Design: Toni McGee Causey

  * * *

  Ordering Information: Special discounts are available on quantity orders by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.

  * * *

  Debris & Detritus/Burroughs, P. – 1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-940699-15-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932926

  To all the lesser-knowns among us.

  We all have a story to tell, and we’re starting here.

  Foreword

  Rhonda Eudaly

  Once upon a time, a relatively new writer supplemented her income by working in “The Family Business” of building broadcast radio transmitters with her father. One day, this writer worked in a remote location with her father and his friend and colleague, Mike, both of whom were Old School Radio Guys. The unlikely trio dealt with the tedious task of cutting and cleaning copper pipe . . .

  Not only was this task tedious, it was also hot and dirty. We were exhausted. As we were cleaning this copper pipe, Mike boomed out—in his trained, Old School Radio Voice—“Debris and Detritus!” I popped off, not missing a beat, “The lesser known of the Greek gods!” Hilarity ensued—booming laughter, crying, realizing we were punch drunk from being exhausted . . . but in that moment, it was the most hilarious thing EVER! And it triggered a plot bunny . . .

  My friend and now collaborator, Julia Mandala, was putting together an anthology about Hell. Debris and Detritus wanted to be written. A story burst forth in all its random craziness, but instead of a silly Home Improvement vibe, Debris and Detritus went a more alternative route. The story practically wrote itself; sadly, it refused to title itself, and for the longest time, I was stuck with a title I hated.

  Unfortunately, the story did not place in the anthology, because darn it, just as mine was about to be put in . . . Mike Resnick sent in a story. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!) Nor did it sell with the seriously crappy title—so fast forward to a ConDFW many moons ago, where I’m telling this story to Aaron Allston. He graciously renames my story for me. It went from “Hell’s Housekeepers” (see?) to “Queer Eye for the Dead Guy.”

  Selling the story still took a while. Thank goodness for the wondrous people at Four Star Stories. They gave the piece a home.

  Now, fast forward again to yet another ConDFW, where I told this story (again) as a warm-up to a panel. A lovely woman in the audience decided it was a fabulous idea for Debris and Detritus to have all their stories told and it should be a collection and that collection should revolve around my story. Then she made it happen with the most amazing gathering of writers.

  This group of writers from all walks of life—and genres—came together from across the country and across the pond to make you laugh, to make you cry, to creep you out, or warm your heart. There are writers I’ve known for years that I’ve never shared a table of contents with as well as those I’ve worked with before. But most are complete strangers who saw something in this freaky idea and ran with it. It’s a collection of mostly women writers, which I find amazing—but as I’ve heard Ice-T say of Law and Order: SVU writers, “Women writers write the sickest stuff.” You can take that however you want.

  I am astonished and amazed by the fact that this happened—surreal is the term I’ve been using. Sadly, neither Mike nor Aaron is with us any longer to see what a couple of random thoughts have wrought, because I totally owed them drinks for this. So enjoy the resulting stories, and thank you for coming along for the ride. Hopefully we will make you laugh, cry, check under your bed, and maybe even sleep with the lights on.

  When you’re done, raise a glass to all the lesser-knowns among us. We all have a story to tell, and we’re starting here.

  * * *

  Rhonda Eudaly

  1

  The Night I Shot Johnny Valentine

  Max Adams

  The night I shot Johnny Valentine, I was not expecting to shoot someone. Johnny Valentine was not expecting to get shot either, if his expression was any indication.

  I would have shot Johnny for his name alone. It’s a really annoying name. But I have been trying to curb my murderous ways. This is not easy if you are the bastard daughter of a pack of vengeful Olympian gods crossed with a vengeful tribe of warrior Spartans. My twin sister, DT, gets very annoyed when I say this. DT likes to pretend she’s the nice demi-god in the family. She’s really not. She doesn’t just shoot people. She evaporates people from time to time. And this was DT’s fault, anyway, for courting a hoarder.

  DT loves hoarders. She says their homes are tributes to us, and she visits them all the time. I told her the other day I saw a woman on Sixth Street drop a full beer, and I did not assume that was an act of worship. But did she listen? No. Thousands of years, and DT is still petul
ant and childlike—another personality trait I chalk up to our unfortunate ancestry that she does not find amusing. (My sister has no sense of humor.) Anyway—

  Johnny Valentine’s mother was a hoarder, and DT would go traipsing over to Mother Valentine’s regularly to check in on her. DT dragged me along once. The Valentine abode is a small, square house on a thin little street off North Lamar in Austin. Its claim to fame outside is two broken-down, two-door maroon Chevys in the overgrown drive (who gets two maroon cars?) and very old, yellow, peeling paint. Its claim to fame inside is newspapers from around the entire world in stacks that are sometimes five and seven feet high. It’s like the Tardis. Outside it looks tiny, but inside, it can hold the world’s entire history of newspapers. (Shut up, demi-goddesses can like Doctor Who.) Old, yellowed, newspaper towers with thin paths between them and the occasional mail order ceramic aquatic figurine sitting atop those stacks to hold them steady.

  It kind of is a tribute, when you really take it in. I’m just not fond of ceramic frogs.

  During DT’s last foray, though, ghastly news! Mother Valentine had died in slippers and a tatty pink terry cloth robe, sitting in the only clear spot in the living room—a small space among the newspaper stacks, featuring a Naugahyde recliner and ancient cathode-tube television set. And Sister Valentine—oh yes, there was a daughter—was on the scene cleaning house.

  DT was so upset, she materialized and knocked two pillars of 1970s New York Times stacks and one green ceramic frog to the ground. So, natch, Johnny Valentine saw DT and went all Supernatural on our asses. He trailed her home to this mansion we have been staying in that is in probate or some such while angry children fight over the estate, and Johnny Valentine broke through a boarded-over window, whipped out a shotgun and shot me—not DT, oh no, that would have been justice—me! With two pounds of rock salt.

  Okay maybe it was not two pounds. But! Demi-goddess or no, do you have any idea what two shotgun blasts of rock salt do to a girl’s hair? And. Her. Shoes?

  Which is when I pulled a natty little derringer that I assume belonged to Emory Quail, our deceased mansion benefactor, out of an antique oak desk drawer in what must once have been a library and shot Johnny Valentine back. Right in the ass—since by that point Johnny was figuring out he was not the hero of a Supernatural TV episode, I was not a ghost who would dissipate at the first sign of rock salt, and that he was in trouble.

  (I’m surprised that derringer fired; it was terribly old, and I did not even know if it was loaded, but it was loaded, I was enraged, and fire it did.)

  (Also, people, can we have a small conference on rock salt here? If you are going to attack the bastard demi-god daughter of a war god with rock salt, don’t make it road salt. Go out and get something nice, maybe kosher sea salt or a nice bath salt. Seriously, road salt? That is not respect.)

  Johnny was a strapping young computer nerd—which is to say too old to live with his mother, overweight, very tall and awkward, and tragically attired in a hoodie, ill-fitting jeans, and a T-shirt advertising an anime character—so the bullet didn’t really slow him down. Johnny had a lot of padding in his left butt cheek. But when I picked up the 200-pound antique oak desk and smacked him with that, he went down.

  Now here I was, sitting on the third-story roof looking out over the oaks surrounding the house and at the distant downtown buildings of Austin as the sun was setting. Those buildings are all glass-faced and really gleam when the sun is setting. Also, Austin trees never grow really tall. Something about the water table and some sort of stone underground table stopping the roots from growing. Those oaks just grow up to the roof, and then they stop. Sometimes I think these Austin oaks are like demi-gods. We never quite go up to Olympus. We go only so high and then we stop. But I digress . . .

  There I was, smoking and sitting on the broken slate-tiled roof. And there Johnny was, downstairs, strapped to a lone surviving antique desk chair in a room filled with empty mahogany shelves that at one time may have contained books but now just held cobwebs and memories of books—probably sold off during hard times or some war—with a derringer bullet in his left butt cheek and shouting about some ancient tree (clearly not an Austin oak) he was going to get a limb from to stab me with.

  Men!

  I’m terribly fond of Austin. It is a city full of spoiled college students who have never learned to pick up after themselves and who like to drink a lot. Every Sunday morning, the city is full of discarded party streamers and plastic drink cups and forgotten pieces of clothing and footwear that college students manage to lose on Friday and Saturday nights. I always wonder how the person who lost one shoe got home wearing only one shoe when I see some Converse sneaker lying in the road. But I love it. “Now that is tribute,” I will say to DT. And DT will say, “Oh Bris, you just will never understand.”

  (DT thinks she is smarter than me because she was born 12 minutes earlier. She might be right; she is the one who dematerialized when Johnny Valentine came crashing through that boarded-up window so SHE did not get her hair filled with rock salt. I’m not going to tell her that, though. She’s already too smug.)

  So I’m sitting on the roof mourning my designer shoes and picking rock salt out of my hair and hacking Johnny Valentine’s iPhone when DT rematerializes on the roof next to me, and for once she thought something was funny. Bastard! But finally she stopped laughing—at my hair! And we sat there on old broken slate roof tiles staring out over the old oaks’ tops at the setting sun’s light gleaming on Austin downtown buildings—thinking murderous thoughts about Johnny Valentine.

  DT, of course, thought we should just vaporize Johnny Valentine. That’s actually what she did to old Emory Quail, the manse’s former resident, who was a lovely woman if you did not mind her shouting, cursing, spitting, refusing to put in her false teeth and—

  Throwing any objects she was not too frail to lift.

  Emory was too frail to lift most objects when we met her, being ninety or so, with gnarled hands and a cane to walk with that she leaned so heavily on sometimes I thought she would break it. And that is leaning hard since Emory could not have weighed more than eighty pounds.

  Emory never hurled anything bigger than a very thin paperback book. A romance novel, if I remember correctly, which seemed very out of character for Emory. I admired Emory for the effort, though, and wondered just what sort of objects she threw in her youth. But—

  The house was perfect, practically boarded up already, and stuffed with so much debris and detritus counting back centuries and generations even I was ready to admit it really was a tribute. There was an entire bedroom filled just with old antique mirrors stacked one against the other. Tall, upright mirrors with heavy ornate wood and metal frames, back to back against walls, and furniture filling the whole room. A music room with an upright piano in it that could only be reached if you wove between stacks of boxes and antique wooden furniture, sometimes needing to turn sideways just to squeeze through to reach the piano. It made you wonder why the library was the room that was empty. But still.

  It was—perfect.

  DT’s logic, murdering Emory Quail, was if Emory Quail went missing, it would be years before anyone could even claim she was dead so we would have the house to ourselves. It’s valid logic, and we’d been there almost seven years before the Quail clan finally got a death certificate and started fighting over the property itself. And then a few more years while the Quail clan relatives were battling things out in court. It looked like there would be years to go.

  Till Johnny Valentine kicked in a boarded-up window to attack me with a shotgun filled with rock salt. Rock salt! For feck’s sake!

  DT was horribly disappointed in me for shooting Johnny in the ass instead of some more calculated and vulnerable anatomical kill zone.

  I, of course, pointed out, and very logically I think by the way, that it’s not easy aiming and firing a gun on the spur when you have a face full of rock salt.

  Meanwhile, downstairs, it sounded like Joh
nny was getting winded. The shouting was gearing down. Finally! There were no close neighbors to hear him, but all that shouting was stressful and annoying.

  “So,” said DT, “What are we going to do with him?” Giving me that dark look that means “You really should have aimed better, and then we would not have this inconvenience.”

  You cannot exactly call the police about an intruder you just shot in the ass when you are a several thousand years old demi-goddess squatting in the falling-down manse of an aging spinster heiress your twin sister vaporized because the woman just wouldn’t share. Twenty-three bedrooms, and Emory Quail wouldn’t even negotiate. One altar and the third floor. That’s all we asked! She couldn’t even walk up the stairs to the third floor! I call that selfish.

  Also, we couldn’t exactly spring Johnny Valentine. He would blab, and he did have a bullet in his ass. That’s called “proof.” Authorities would investigate. Bloggers would blog. Most people would think Johnny was crazy, but if he didn’t come back, some zealot would actually believe him and come looking. And what if it was a religious zealot? They are the worst! There would be chanting and incense and people throwing holy water about and maybe even more rock salt—

  I’d probably have to shoot someone again!

  Just thinking about it was exhausting.

  We could, of course, just kill him. That’s what DT wanted to do. Though I’m really trying to stop doing that. Seriously. I took up smoking in the first place just to calm my nerves and try to NOT kill people. But I had been perusing Johnny’s iPhone, and Johnny kept an online journal of some kind and had posted about us and his “mission” to go “ghost bust.” Plus, he apparently hung out with other computer ghost-hunting zealots in online forums who would know where he disappeared, and then they would come about waving rock salt and ancient tree limbs, too, and the madness would. Just. Never. Stop.