PREAGONIC - the state prior to the time immediately before death

Coagulated blood does have a metallic taste. I never meant to try it. Whoever means to choke on their own blood? All these incomprehensible things are breaching the surface. Mostly contemporary losses. Nothing too terrible like the past lifting from its shallow grave. Nothing like that. Simply broad strokes of my mundane humanity merging into a psychotic dependency with my patients. For that reason, my work in warped reality psychological fusion analysis is still considered pseudoscience, even in the 29th century.

Some time ago, though I cannot be certain of when, I had a patient who experienced this peculiar phenomenon of preagonic shepherding. It is not a task the individual chooses or rightfully claims. It is thankless, but he was a destined guardian beset with guiding souls into their new two-dimensional reference points. I am uncertain of how, but he pulled them from the once bustling world of the living into a freeze frame storage by way of painting. There is no sort of permanence in this work, as the matrix can change and interrupt their destiny at any given moment. 

I recall that many, if not all, subjects he captured were just outside his nuclear family. If not related by blood, they fell into the abstract space of my patient’s love and great endearment. He was an artist by force, as they all are when given the compulsion to create. As I mentioned, he painted them. Which is still the best-known courier for souls. Of course, the paintings appeared brutal and delinquent to veil the priceless fragility moored inside them. 

There was an ancient beldam solidified in thoughtful Easter tones. She was 116 years old and handed off her power to a toddler. There was a fastidious poker player in his halcyon daze of endless neon. His glitch was a welcomed one, I decided. There was an enigmatic beauty devolving into the matrix. I recall she was resurrected into something entirely different. Terrifically uncanny were these diluted film stills of his own life on canvas. Recordings of premonitions in enigmatic alien color show these subjects glitching in their pre-agonal state; moments from death, the fabric of reality itself malfunctions as the soul transitions from the body. Here, I find myself in this same place. Perhaps my patient will shepherd me. As the preagonic fades, I feel myself succumbing to the big sleep.