PSYCHOPOMP

Memphis, 3,066 BCE: Anubis twitched his ear towards the sound of agony
echoing through the tomb. His claws left tallies on the limestone floor as he
jumped onto a high marble slab to comfort a man who was struggling against his
myrrh-soaked binds. Another stuck one, begging for mercy. The jackal curled into
the crook of the mummy’s arm and told him a story about the future:

I have lived as everyone who has ever existed, and everyone who will ever exist. I
remember my life as the soul that won’t let you cross over. She’s not dead yet. She
outlives you in every millennia. I know how everyone dies.

I watched you die in 2066; the year locusts appeared over the Caspian Sea, seeding
the sky with silver iodine and whipping the clouds into a meteorological frenzy.
The sea hardened into dark, heavy, magnetic gel that sucked drones out of the sky.
Caspian swallowed them like a whale and disappeared into a pinhole in the ground.
The clay was dry by the next morning.

The liquid tornado barreled through the earth’s core and reemerged as a geyser in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Three days later, the entire mid-Atlantic Seaboard was
underwater. Survivors trembled in skyscrapers and barricaded themselves inside
penthouses. Competing cryostorage companies littered the sky with banner planes
showing climate models that predicted an imminent ice age. They promised to
revive their loyal subscribers when the earth healed from its frostbite. The airspace
was choked by advertisements showing octogenarian celebrities with titanium
knees gliding on skateboards in the desert. The last electricity was spent on
generating animations that looped outside our algae-covered windows day and
night. Every day I watched a soccer player who should have died forty years ago
spin around the Caspian Half-Pipe on a BMX bike. He was one of the first athletes
to be stored in the Amazon warehouse in New Rochelle. I watched trucks unload
thousands of tanning beds into a hospital. Metal and plastic, their cassia and linen.

I saw the scared and willing leap onto helicopters begging to be saved. Many
drowned. Those with the means paid for the most comfortable facilities in scenic
locations. A place on Third Avenue allowed some of the more exhibitionist
celebrities to sell tickets. One day on a walk we saw a long line of excited people
and asked whose tomb they were queued for. You insisted we visit the last living
member of your favorite band from 1966 and when we finally saw him you fell on
your knees and cried. In another room, a fuse blew and a sitcom actress was
starting to rot. Her fans were throwing up on the sidewalk. It was bad PR. They
closed all the freezers to the public and families, claiming it was bad hygiene.

A small sect of the East Coast got into boats and tanned to leather in the open
ocean. You were their leader. I tell everyone about you like a screen in my belly.
Parties; you always knew when to leave them. You noticed the low hanging fruit
was all packed away and the advertisers were changing their tactics. You rescued a
flock of angels and prevented them from this disgusting purgatory in the
slush-covered city. I did not have the constitution to follow you to a brief, pelagic
life on the ocean before dying next to you as a martyr.

Alone, I was vulnerable to getting lured into the freezers, but I knew too much
about the process and carried too much death in my nostrils to smell what they
were selling: a reversible, symptom-free solution to a temporarily embarrassed
utopia. I became a horsefly in the city you jilted, scavenging the post-panic
economy. I hustled nerve gas to undead celebrities, freezer-burned has-beens who
could not die. Their families could not free them from their contracts, because all
the lawyers were frozen. I candy striped in the hide of a jackal, stalking ice palaces,
looking for opportunities to be man’s best friend, the undoer of avarice, the last
thing they saw behind a pink beam of diphenhydramine before my gas tank purred
chartreuse into their sealed room, liberating another subscriber from their contract.

The skies were so quiet then. Not a single plane had been built since they froze the
last engineer. He was stored under the Shenandoah Mountains like a pharaoh. I
knew his family would pay me handsomely for his freedom, but I could not get to
him. Jack Frost wanted my scalp.

After a long year of taking souls, I finally had two glass eyes and a full set of teeth
to trade the computer for a ten-second video of an attempt to recreate what you
looked like the night we met: the last day of 2025. I bent down to the screen and
wondered how to describe you to the seventy-one year old sketch artist who knew
everything but was born blind. She made your gait look unnatural, but imitated
your voice perfectly. You would have hated it, but you weren’t around. I listened to
your voice on a loop until it took on the form of a little battery in my stomach. A
tiny star that kept me warm on the snowy walk through the Shenandoah Valley.
When I bag the last Boeing engineer’s scalp I’m going to buy the world’s biggest
sledgehammer and shout love at the heart of the world until the freeze-panic-freeze
cycle breaks. I will demolish every premature tomb that I have locked myself in
and level the ones I built to trap others. I will forgive myself for giving way to fear
the way I forgive the lesser Vonnegut for synthesizing the cloudbusting molecule.
Every second alive is the best moment yet. Love is a dog from hell, I told the
engineer. All that hell has filled the dog with love. I gave him some champagne
with his pink cough syrup. I gave a toast. I held his ID to his forehead and took a
photo for his family.

These pyramids, catacombs, crypts, and cryofacilities keep a jackal busy. I’m dog
tired. My new year’s resolution? Get more sun. But for now, I’m home again,
curled up in the safety of Grant’s tomb.

Happy New Year,
Happy Birthday,
Happy 2026!

____
Anna Krivolapova lives on the East Coast, and is the author of Incurable Graphomania via Apocalypse Confidential Press.