Refrigerator Magnets

By Patrick Worden

Check out the upcoming heart-stopping horror from Patrick Worden: www.TheyAreVoracious.com

Refrigerator magnets are tools for holding onto memories, for keeping them at eye level, for reviewing and re-seeing every day. It doesn't matter what madness swirls without or within, the refrigerator magnets keep us grounded with constant reminders of the simplest things.

"Mind.Net" author Pat Worden returns with this all new collection of literary fiction, lyrical essays and terse verse. This completely revised E-book includes three previously unpublished short stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Worden
• Release date: Apr 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458123398

Patrick Worden

Pat Worden is an author and freelance writer from the midwest United States. He is charming yet humble, and almost never speaks of himself in the third person.

Book preview

Refrigerator

Magnets

Stories and Observations

by

Pat Worden

Copyright 2011 Patrick J. Worden

http://pworden.com

Smashwords Edition

http://www.smashwords.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Ganesha

And also for my family and my friends.

Many, many others can just rot right off.

Contents

Prologue

Who’m I?

And old man went swimming

Science v Religion

The fall of Irish Red

Hostage rescue

Distant rings

A creed

The Darwin drive

Between here and Orion

Late embrace

Lunacy

Peloponnese

The broad purple stripe

Tell me your secrets

My flawed angel

Danse ecstatic

Trespass 2 chattels

His last chance

Egg tooth

Everyone’s speeding to the same destination

What do you need?

Necessities

Walking with Taliesin

Prologue

Call-forwarding: A techno-shamanic fantasy

Dammit. It’s been an ongoing problem for weeks now.

It started when I forwarded my desk-phone to my company-issued cellphone before leaving work one night. It’s part of my routine, and I do it every evening.

But this time…the phone system suffered some kind of hiccup. My phone stayed in call-forwarding mode, while every other phone on my floor seemed to lose their call-forwarding capabilities.

Whatever. The prob has been logged with the helpdesk, numerous follow-up queries have been made, but it still hasn’t been fixed.

Today, though…I suddenly became curious about something.

My desk-phone is forwarded to my cellphone, right? Well…what would happen if I forwarded that same cell right back to the desk? What would I get? A nicely closed-loop of call forwarding…

Couldn’t let that be just an idle curiosity, of course. So I went ahead and did it. Then I wheeled over to a nearby desk, and dialed in my deskphone’s extension…

It was weird. It was glorious. It began with a shrill beep from my cell. Followed by a similar sound from my deskphone. Then a quicker one from my cell, and a quicker one from my desk…

...back and forth, like an ancient game of Pong. Faster, shriller, more intense…

And then the lights dimmed, and they were gone. Our computers began shutting down, one by one, as the network disappeared. Surprised, angry voices sounded throughout the room.

Dazed, I wandered to the exit. What I found outside did nothing to allay my nervousness.

Tripping like grounded-out breakers, all the buildings throughout this industrial park were shedding their electricity and going dark. Streetlights and traffic signals were shutting down. Traffic was growing crazy and confused.

But beneath that…the hum had gone away. Do you know the hum? It’s always there, so you rarely notice it. But when the power’s gone, during a blackout or electrical storm, you notice that eerie and profound silence. That’s the lack of hum.

Had I wrought this? That’s what I was asking myself. And just as quickly, the answer came: Of course I had, I had no doubt. I felt some fear at first – the fear of a Luddite who’d just smashed his machine.

But that faded, and soon I felt only joy. I looked behind me and saw a thin stream of co-workers, also wandering from the impotent building, trying to find something to do, some way to cope.

I’m not sure why, but they looked to me. Silent, wide-eyed, looking for a leader…

At my feet, I saw a handful of twigs, blown from the trees in some recent gale.

I closed my eyes for a moment, and cast my mind back. Years ago, decades ago…when I wore a neat green uniform and a neckerchief and merit badges…I cast my mind back and recovered those long-forgotten lessons.

Then I reached and grasped two of those sticks and held them high over my head. I turned and addressed this frightened crowd that longed to become a tribe…

Come! I teach you to build fire!

Who’m I?

No one special, just a bastard child of the lower-middle class, of the rust-belt Midwest, of the public schools and the state colleges, of the seventies and eighties and nineties.

I’ve always fancied myself a writer, for whatever that’s worth, but for most of my life I never embraced that as anything more than a far-off dream…because guys from my neighborhood created nothing by their own free will; they joined the army or went to work instead, in factories or restaurants or dull plastic stores.

Knowing nothing else, I followed that path for years. I worked dozens of jobs, for good men and horrible men, alongside fine, honest people and alongside free-walking criminals. I worked in places where a dispute might be settled by H.R. arbitration, and I worked in places where a dispute might be settled by flinging a wrench at some asshole’s head.

For the longest and most thoughtful of those years, I was overworked and underpaid as an EMT and ambulance dispatcher, in a dirty city, mostly in the service of poor, sick people who died like flies. I met and worked with some of the finest humanitarians in the world there, people who’d pour out their hearts and souls and would weave CPR and first-aid magic with practiced hands, for the sake of the filthy and the homeless, that they might live one more wretched day. And I worked with devils in uniform, who’d cop illicit feels (or worse) of unconscious teenage girls, and who would rummage through the coins and dollars of comatose oldsters, on their way to atrocious state-run nursing homes that were really just waystations for lonely death. For my part, I was caring and callous in turn. I saved occasional lives, but also wished an end to the most bothersome of our frequent flyers, who nonetheless usually hung on for years despite the worst that