Psalms for the End of the World

by Cole Haddon

Everybody she knows, including Sigmund, now display their anxiety like a pulsating aura for all to see. It is as if there’s been a collective human surrender to an inscrutable inevitability, an unknowable impending doom, and living with it, especially navigating the new social permutations that shift and evolve daily because of it, is exhausting. Mimori’s daughters seem especially sensitive to it. It’s always been a virtue of youth, to live with the confidence that nothing is impermanent, that life and everything you love will go on for ever, but now her children, like all of their friends, like children everywhere across Earth, sense that might not be true and are withering, are cracking in a miscellany of ways, are going mad as a result.