Awash in Talent Read Online Free Page A

and the girders were words. Most memorably, she said, “It’s really great that you’re digging up all this stuff now. You can carry the memory of these discoveries into whatever happens next.”
    “What happens next?” I asked rather too shrilly. I glanced at Carlos, two pits over.
    Beth wiped her arm across her beading forehead, creating a brown smear. “Well, no one really knows what happens after we die,” she said lightly, continuing to use a sharp dental instrument to define the outline of what might have been an ancient fingertip. “Or whether the end of the world will be a special case. I mean, when everybody dies all at once, will the souls have to wait in line? The traffic!”
    “When everybody dies all at once?” I insisted.
    “Well, maybe not all at once,” she said. “But you know, with climate change, the ocean levels will rise higher than ever in the next few years. With everybody competing for land and food, there’s bound to be a mass die-off.”
    I had learned about such extinctions, of course, but they had never seemed so alarming before. I looked down at the fossils, but mostly at the dirt in which they were encased. If all this was gone in a few years, what would I have to show for myself? I looked at Carlos again, wondering if our souls would be caught waiting together on the off ramp to the next place. Would Carlos’s soul have that crazy blond hair?
    “So you blithely accept the end of the world as we know it?” I asked.
    “Well, sure. What can we do about it?”
    I wondered whether my sister had been this interesting all along.
    The last day before my family left, Beth and I sat in the dust around the pit where Carlos was gently prodding at his prized femur. The sun was digging into my skin and causing so much sweat to well up, it was as if I’d been in the shower, but much less pleasant. It didn’t matter. All I really wanted were Carlos’s arms around me and his hot breath in my ear.
    For some reason, that thought made me look at my sister. Her stare was so icy, I knew I would never need to pay for air conditioning again. She nodded toward Carlos, and I saw that the bone he had been so precisely extracting from the ancient layers of silt and dust had suddenly jumped into his cupped hand. He hadn’t even had time to put down his scalpel, and the whole valley seemed to echo with the clink it made against the ancient bone.
    Carlos remained frozen, his jaw sinking lower and lower toward the ground. “What happened?” I cried. The only reply I got was a pile of gauze gliding, ghostlike, toward Carlos as if it knew it was needed for the safe transport and cataloging of the precious bone.
    “Beth?” I said.
    She looked back at me, too serious, so we stood up and walked toward the communications tent where she had so recently collapsed.
    “Are you ready to go home?” I said, parentally, because I couldn’t bear to ask the real question: whether she had had anything to do with the objects’ movement. I didn’t know what the telekinesis policy was in Ethiopia, but back in the States, people with that kind of Talent were closely monitored and often forced to live in communes that a lot of civil rights groups compared to concentration camps.
    She came back at me with the most distracting question possible. “Why do you hang on him like that? He’s not that special. Plus, he’s married. He talks about his wife all the time, haven’t you noticed?”
    Intellectually, I knew that he was not only married but also had a baby. But I felt in my heart that such a relationship could only be a passing fancy compared to the love Carlos and I would share into eternity and beyond.
    “No, he doesn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I needed to throw Beth off the scent. “You behave the rest of the day. Don’t touch anything, don’t move anything.”
    I huffily led to her back to a flagged area no one else was working on and we spent the rest of her last day in the