jknkThe Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 31
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horrorn

The WorldCat

I ask the WorldCat a question. She purrs and languidly she paws a book forward into my eager hands. It is Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I am skeptical. I coax the WorldCat, scritching behind her ears. Whiskers aquiver, she consents to bat a few other books in my direction: they slide along the greasy carpet, abrading their faded paper covers: Peter Singer, T. M. Scanlon, Aristotle.
          Aristotle! I am irked. What am I supposed to do with these?
          I must have indicated my displeasure somehow, because the WorldCat subvocalizes and opens her eyes a tad and bends her head in my direction. I quiet down.
          Two years ago my brother, more arrogant than I, had harassed the WorldCat for information on engineering practices, tensile strengths, calculations, parabolas and velocities, maths that built things, things I can’t explain. He was greedy for the wisdom of the WorldCat. What he would have done with it I do not know. He had no access, none of us do, to factories, or to men with capital, or iron mines or coal seams or oil. But my brother amassed a sense of grand possibility within himself, at the sufferance of the WorldCat, and when he asked for a book on microtrading the WorldCat lapped him up with her mighty tongue, and that was the last scheme of my poor brother’s.
          Now I sleep with my remaining family, luckiest of all the remaining families, cuddled against the gigantic and comforting belly-fur of the WorldCat, and when she stretches in her slumber we jerk to attention and rush away and give her room to indulge her self-comfort. Her books we never approach, jailed as they are within her mighty jaws. If we wish to read Shakespeare we wait for her to wake, and we say to her, O mighty WorldCat, may I hear of the melancholy Dane—or, in another mood, we ask, may we hear about the girl who dressed like a boy in the forest of Arden?
          She grants our desires mostly, and on special days we exhibit our gratitude with theatrical displays of education and artistic cunning, and the WorldCat honors our performances with her eyes unblinking wide and her long tail aflick, aflick with attention and, we think, delight.
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