Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,129

an old man, all jagged bone edges and drum-tight skin.

A man, maybe not all that old, maybe barely fifty, who only looks like a walking, hairless cadaver because he has been undergoing radiation treatments and chemotherapy for his lung cancer.

The demon wobbles forward; close enough, this time, for me to see his eyes when that cloud drifts away from the moon.

His hazel-green eyes.

My eyes.

“Stop!” he wheezes. “Now!”

And I know.

He is my wraith.

The ghost of a person on the verge of death sent forth to haunt himself.

He is me.

I am sixteen years old but staring at my own dying soul, shrouded in a white knit hospital blanket from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City where Brenda Narramore has come to say farewell to her long-ago summer love, where my wife has kept constant vigil, sleeping by my side in the hospital bed, forgiving me when I bribed an orderly to sneak me a pack of Marlboros so I could creep downstairs to the sidewalk with my rolling IV pole of postchemo drips to have one last smoke. My wife, who is weeping now because I am dying while the most crucial events of my life flash before my shuttering eyes.

I force my spirit back in time in an attempt to right the wrongs I did to myself.

“Stop!” I wheeze at my younger self. Me as I was and as I will become. “Now!”

I have, mercifully in my final moments, been given the opportunity to go back and warn myself.

On the beach.

In the funhouse.

My first cigarette and the one that got me hooked for good. The one I never quit from again.

Or did I?

I hear my withered lungs rattle. The inside of my chest itches and burns.

Did I heed my wraith’s command?

I will never know.

For if I did, I won’t be lying here dying while dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.

Home from America

SHARAN NEWMAN

Sharan Newman is a medieval historian. That is a constant in her life. As a writer, however, she has published fantasy (the Guinevere trilogy), eleven historical mysteries (the Catherine LeVendeur series), three nonfiction books, and a number of articles and short stories in several genres, including one in the Stephen King issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. For her most recent book, The Real History of the End of the World (Berkley, 2010), she was able to use all of these genres to find how people through history have envisioned the end of time. She lives on a mountainside in Oregon.

PATRICK Anthony O’Reilly had dark curls, deep blue eyes, and a smile that could bewitch any woman from eight to eighty and beyond. He had the gift of gab, a hollow leg for porter and poteen, a fine tenor, and a cheerful readiness to join in any brawl going. Every St. Paddy’s Day he was sure to be found at Biddy McGraw’s pub, weeping in homesickness for Galway and cursing the English. In short, he was as fine an Irishman as ever came out of Cleveland.

When his friends pointed out to him that his family had come over to America in 1880, Patrick brushed the fact aside as unimportant.

“That doesn’t make me a whit less Irish,” he’d brag. “Four generations in America and not one of my family has ever married out.”

“Who else would have you?” his friend Kevin once countered. “Might have done you some good if they had. They breed runts in your clan.”

That was a low blow. Patrick hadn’t spoken to Kevin for a month after that. But what did you expect? Kevin was a typical American mongrel: Polish, Italian, and Irish. The best you could say about his family was that they were all Catholic. But it was the jab at his size that cut Pat so deeply. He was barely five foot two, with hair gel. His parents were even shorter; his mother not even five feet. Pat had had to develop a lot of charm to get himself noticed in a world of hulking football players and long-legged women.

His size and youthful looks also meant that he could never get a pint without his ID being scrutinized with a magnifying glass. And sometimes even then, nervous bartenders shooed him out.

At twenty-five he still lived with his parents and worked at the post office alongside his father, Michael, and his cousins, sorting mail from all over the world while never leaving his own neighborhood. The O’Reillys tended to stay close, enduring the teasing about their size as a unified