Your Special Brain
Visit realms unknown, in ‘Psychopomps Are Us’ by Melanie Marttila, with this excerpt from Issue 38, Spring 2023.
Psychopomps Are Us
by Melanie Marttila
The attendants lower you into the Kerning Couch. You are rigid and wild-eyed, but they don’t bother to reassure you. There will be muscle relaxants and twilight sedatives administered in another moment.
A cap with sensors is snugged into place over your shaved head to monitor your beautiful, special brain, without which you could not do this work. Nasal prongs follow, and more sticky pads and clips to monitor heartbeat, pulse, oxygen, and temperature. The Psychopomp Corps obsess over the physical wellbeing of their operatives.
You’re holding up well, keeping that chin stiff, but your eyes give you away: too much white showing, pupils reduced to dots. Your arms remain relaxed when the attendants insert the intravenous, and the first drips have no noticeable effect. But then your eyelids flutter and your tension falls away. You fall away. It won’t be long now.
Your astral form consolidates in the bedroom of Kristina Blonski, who died in her sleep from a brain aneurysm.
You orient, focusing on the cheap floral comforter and matching curtains, the refinished highboy, vanity, and chest — old but not antique — and the still body in the bed.
Kristina’s spirit sweeps up behind you. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my room?”
You quell a start, swallow a gasp. Those responses belong to your body. You struggle to leave it and its reactions in the living world and rotate to face your assigned spirit. “Kristina Blonski?”
“Answer my question.” She leans down, in your face almost literally.
You tingle where spirit touches astral body. “I’m your guide to the afterlife.”
Find out what happens next, in Issue 38, Spring 2023!
Always looking up, eyes on the skies, head in the clouds, #actuallyautistic author Melanie Marttila writes poetry and speculative tales of hope in the face of adversity. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi. Visit Melanie at melaniemarttila.ca.
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