Deaths Excellent Vacation by Charlaine Harris, Toni L. P. Kelner Page A

watch the flags. They play with Game Boys and plug their ears with iPods. They giggle and bicker, and kick and punch, and yell “Pow! Wham!” like they are making up their own soundtrack. The boy with the long braid farts like an elephant; nothing worse than the smell of teenage boy. The fathers are polite and heat endless hot water for tea.
    It’s clear what Lan’s talents are. She makes popcorn and sushi, cleans the trout they occasionally catch, braids pigtails, dries little-girl tears.
    On the afternoon of the second day the fog comes in.
    “We aren’t going fishing today,” Mr. Green says. “Probably not tomorrow. You can play with your Game Boys in the cabin.”
    They give him the big-eyed stare.
    “Ice is dangerous. Can be a foot thick one step, two inches thick the next. Worse when there’s a thaw. Where the Muskeag comes into the lake, the river water’s eating the ice from below. Where the ice got broken up by our old fishing holes, where the fish gather, where there’s a lot of weed, the ice is thinning out and not healing yet. By the shore the level of the water goes up and down and the ice breaks. But it’s foggy, so you’re not thinking about that, just trying to find your way to the shore. Unless you know to respect the ice, and you kids don’t, you don’t fish.”
    The kids mutter in Japanese.
    He and Lan go outside, and she checks the weather report on her magic phone. “Above freezing for the next two days,” she points out.
    “You foresaw that, right? So it’s your problem.”
    “Come on. They could have a more interesting time.”
    Their boots slush through the runny snow.
    “You could do for them what you did,” she says. “You and the others. Back then.”
    “That’s what you want for your kids? Bam, pow, monster? I don’t do that anymore.”
    “They can’t even go out in this,” she says.
    “Just can’t fish.”
    “They can’t. No. I mean they don’t want to go out in this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”
    “Which are?” he says.
    “They’re shape-changers.”
    He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.
    “You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.
    She doesn’t say a word now.
    “You cursed them?”
    He doesn’t believe in personal curses.
    “None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.
    She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.
    “What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”
    “Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”
    Ten years is a moment.
    “I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”
    “What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”
    “How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”
    “I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”
    “Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”
     
     
    WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.
    She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.
    It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.
    “— foresaw this?” he pants.
    She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”
    “I don’t fly—”
    He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from