Cleaning Day (short story)
From Jenny Everywhere Wiki
Cleaning Day was a Jenny Everywhere short story written by Scott Sanford in 2022 and is part of his bespoke Jenny Everywhere continuity.
Contents
Plot
For a long time now, Jenny Everywhere has been indiscriminately stuffing items brought back from interdimensional jaunts into her closet. When one of the items within it — a mammoth-fur coat — gets wet and begins to stink up the apartment, Kim finally browbeats Jenny into helping her to go through the closet's contents to sort them out. They include an amnesia orb which causes them quite a bit of trouble as it keeps erasing itself from their memories and getting lost again, until Kim finally thinks to wrap it inside an old shirt and stuff it into a box before they let it out of their sights again. Eventually, they locate the mammoth-fur coat and, “with great relief”, consign it to the dry cleaner.
Worldbuilding
Jenny Everywhere
- The Jenny featured in this story is the default incarnation of Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories. Her closet contains paraphernalia belonging to other Jennies, including The World is Toast, a book which she specifies was written by another Jenny.
Universes
- The story takes place in the default universe of Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories. A Bible is described as a “leather-bound King Charles Version with only six gospels, omitting Bartholomew”, in a manner strongly suggesting that it is normal for this universe rather than one of Jenny's interdimensional aberrations — giving some clue as to the minor divergences between this universe and real-world history.
Other
- Contents of the closet include:
- A Barrett Light Fifty rifle.
- A cloak made up of Stegosaurus hide, described as “robust but not in fashion in this universe”.
- A picture depicting Jenny standing in front of a biplane, with “Burma, 1931” written in Jenny's own handwriting, though Jenny doesn't remember the picture's origins.
- The Crown of the Vampire King, described as a “powerful mystical artefact”.
- An amnesia orb, described as a “mystical sphere the size of a golf ball that disrupts the short-term memory of anyone who looks at it”.
- Professor Awesome's de-pants-icator.
- A Reality Bomb, specifically a “Mark IV Peace Bomb”, property of the Unified States Reality Service, bearing the best-by date “best before 3 March 2267”.
- A tin taped shut with masking tape, apparently containing “the concept of squimulation”.
- A lava lamp filled with “blue-green glowing slime, with assorted alphabetic symbols floating inside”, also described as “liquid illumination”.
- A “loose pile of MREs, all “Dodo Stew flavor”.
- An athletic nylon bag full of thousands of dollars in Canadian Tire money, which Jenny claims to have acquired when she uncovered “a Florida man's counterfeiting operation”.
- A German operation manual for a 1949 “Nazi flying saucer” called a Volksflieger.
- A pair of invisible pants.
- The World is Toast, written by another incarnation of Jenny, described as “a travelogue and cookbook containing many amusing anecdotes and recipes for over 200 varieties of toast”.
- A stone tablet describing a summoning ritual for Tepoztecatl, “the Mesoamerican god of pulque and by extension all alcoholic beverages”, who Jenny says is no longer occupying his normal functions and has instead moved to Minneapolis.
- An antigravity flight harness.
- A Gnomeometer, “jammed on '2'”.
- A bullet-proof umbrella which Kim explains is one of hers, having acquired it from a Russian in the 1980s.
- A rocket boot, originally part of a pair.
- A “tourist map of attractions around Koala Bay, NSW, Australia”.
- A take-out menu for the Good Time Chinese Restaurant, whose address places it in a city which does not exist in Kim and Jenny's universe.
- A back issue of Pravda from the 1980s whose headline mentions Gorbachev singing.
- A leather-bound King Charles Version Bible with “only six gospels, omitting Bartholomew”.
- A large pile of freebie T-shirts advertising various obscure bands and musicians.
- A broken “Carnot engine” perpetual motion machine.
- A seemingly-normal toaster bearing a note saying “Perfectly Normal Toaster”, much to Kim's suspicion.
- A “small and badly cracked plastic jar” containing Resublimated Thiotimoline.
- Posters from a version of the Louvre, reproducing “Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Ovunque and a print of Raphael's sketch Nude with Scarf”.
- A CD of “the David Cassidy inauguration”.
- A “black superhero costume made of some thick rubbery substance, inexplicably molded with idealized muscular definition and anatomically correct nipples”.
- A “luxurious fur coat, with a multitude of interior pockets”, which is made of mammoth fur and is therefore “both wonderfully warm in the winter and highly odoriferous in the rain”.
Continuity
- Some of the items are references to others of Scott Sanford's Jenny Everywhere stories:
- The Vampire King was previously seen in PROSE: Camera Shy.
- The de-pants-icator was mentioned in PROSE: Paying It Forward and Pit Stop.
- Others reference stories pertaining to other Jennies, with it being ambiguous quite how they wound up in this Jenny's closet. They include:
- The Logos and Jenny's form-fitting movie superhero costume from COMIC: Say The Word.
- A Gnomometer (here spelled Gnomeometer), used by Abúi in her interdimensional travels in COMIC: Incognito.
- A “tourist map of attractions around Koala Bay, NSW, Australia”, referencing the Koala Bay Bares Naturist Resort which Jenny visited on several occasions starting with COMIC: Ghost Story.
- A CD of “the David Cassidy inauguration”, referencing COMIC: Tribute, where a universe where he somehow became President of the United States was mentioned.
Behind the scenes
Background
Rather than his customary author's commentary, Scott Sanford posted a fully-annotated version of the story, explaining its many in-jokes. In addition to those described in the continuity section above, a few are references to other works of fiction:
- The picture of Jenny in Burma, 1931, is described to resemble an illustration by Paul Daly of the character of Tasha O'Dare in his High Adventures Comics, which bore a striking resemblance to Jenny.
- A version of Aztec deity Tepoztēcatl living in modern-day Minneapolis appears in the webcomic Wapsi Square.
- The Good Time Chinese Restaurant is a location from Daria. Notably, it housed a “dimensional wormhole” in the back.
- The issue of Pravda whose front page nonsensically reads “Gorbachev sings tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!" originated in the comic strip Bloom County. In one of its most famous jokes, precocious computer whiz Oliver Wendell Jones attempted to remotely bring an end to the Cold War by introducing onto the front page of Pravda the headline, “Gorbachev Urges Disarmament: Total! Unilateral!”, only for faulty machine translation to cause the headline to read, “Gorbachev Sings Tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!”.
- Resublimated Thiotimoline was a fictional chemical invented by Isaac Asimov in a 1948 spoof academic paper entitled The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline, and used in several follow-ups. Thiotimoline has gone on to be referenced by many other science-fiction writers.
Read online
The story is available on the author's Dreamwidth website.
