2
That Sweetest Cup
Michelle Muenzler
Mortals often mistake me for my brother—hungry times have worn both our frames to the bone, like sun-scoured bits of driftwood. It does not help that we wear our mistakes the same. Or our needs.
Yet some still have eye enough to tell the difference between us.
“You’re not Detritus,” the girl says.
Ragged as a crow, she pecks at the tossed-aside heel of a baguette from the Vietnamese deli down the street. She’s built a crude shrine of cardboard boxes and greasy sneakers in the alley’s recesses and perfumed it with discarded packets of fish sauce and the weeks-old sweat of her labor.
“No,” I say, savoring the scent of her offering, “I am Debris.” Less is more when speaking with mortals. Their kind has little respect for chatty deities.
Her beady eyes pick me apart while she ponders my usefulness. “Hmm, well I suppose you’ll do. Not much difference between the two of you anyway, far as I can tell.”
My cheek twitches in annoyance. Once, everyone knew the difference between us, but now . . .
Mortals can be such fools.
“I want my stuff,” she says. The stale baguette crumples in her fist, spilling crumbs across her knees. “All the crap my parents threw away when they kicked me out was my crap. A part of me. They had no right.”
Oh, how my brother would have loved this girl, had he bothered to answer her call. He is a flighty soul, though, too much the son of the river that birthed us.
“And you wish me to retrieve them for you?”
“Of course,” she says. “Can you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Will you do it?”
I smile knowingly. “Yes.”
This poor lost girl—I understand her far too well. We were born, my brother and I, of a sea nymph’s trickery. Of the ejaculate of Ares thrust unsuspecting into the still waters of Lethe, the action forgotten as soon as it was begun. Discarded by our own parents. Left unclaimed on that tepid shore with only stones to comfort us.
My brother embraces the simpler aspects of our adrift nature. He collects the easy discards—potshards dredged from old shipwrecks, plastic bottles floating unwanted in the southern currents—and creates beautiful art. Sculptures so haunting in their loss as to make the Erinyes weep.
It is unfortunate it was not my brother the girl drew here with her need.
He would have served her better.
When I deliver the first bits of flotsam from her previous life, the girl is pleased. She praises my ability, burns discarded fast food wrappers in my honor. It is a glorious and heady feeling to be worshiped once more. To be wanted. I grow fat on her offerings.
It isn’t until the ring she becomes suspicious.
“Why’s there blood on it?” she asks. She has a room now, a small efficiency apartment paid for by the careful hocking of her more valuable belongings.
The ring in question is a bit of silver wire twisted into the shape of an Ouroboros. Her mother had intended to toss it out, but it slipped free from the trash bag under the rough handling of the garbage collectors and settled comfortably in the curb’s cracks to await a new owner. If I were my brother, I’d lie to the girl—words are as easily thrown away as children, after all. But desire, that fatted bleating lamb, sings too loudly in my veins.
“The ring was claimed,” I say, “and so for you, I made it lost again.” It is my nature, after all. You cannot have debris without destruction.
Oh, how her face twists! How her chest heaves!
And how unexpected the gossamer threads of innocence spilling from the newborn cracks in her self-righteous shell.
The scent of that particular loss blooms headier than any ambrosial draught; it intoxicates in a manner matched only by Dionysius’ debauchery of old. Sweetly, ever so sweetly, I pool its fragrant nectar in my palms and drink until my teeth ache and my stomach’s full to burst, and even then I do not stop.
Let my brother have his art; let him have his trash and lonely hours combing a thoughtless sea.
This mortal dreg belongs to me.
About the Story
I have a fondness for the lost, for the broken dreams of old gods. In Debris and Detritus, I found two twins, seemingly alike until the layers are peeled back, until their very names are unraveled to their core essence. And that is where this story emerged, a tale of one twin in particular being true to his nature in a world that seems to have little use for gods made flesh and much less understanding of the damage in thinking them tame servants for mortal whims.