The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 by Joe Hill

“aggressively,” especially if she’s trying to get pregnant. (Angie starfishes a hand over her belly button and blanches; nobody has said anything to suggest this.) With polite horror, the couple nod along to stories of their predecessors, former tenants who collapsed from heat exhaustion, were bitten by every kind of snake and spider: “Fanged in the ankle and ass, I shit you not, kids. Beware the desert hammock.”
    Average annual rainfall: five inches. Eight-degree nights in December, 112-degree July days. Andy is thinking of Angie’s face on the motel pillow. He calculates they’ve slept together maybe fourteen times in four months. In terms of survival strategies, in a country hostile to growth? These desert plants, so ostentatiously alive in the Mojave, have got zero on Andy.
    Â 
    III. Establishment
    Â 
    Once, and only once, the three of them achieve a perfect union.
    It takes some doing, but Andy finally succeeds in getting her out of the house.
    â€œIt’s our anniversary,” he lies, since they never really picked a day.
    He’s taking Angie to Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a frontier-themed dance hall frequented by bikers and artists and other jolly modern species of degenerates. It’s only six miles northeast of their new home and burns like a Roman candle against the immensity of the Mojave. Through surveying expeditions made in Jerry’s truck, Andy has delimited the boundary lines of Angie’s tolerance; once they move beyond a certain radius, she says that her head feels “green” and her bones begin to ache. Pain holds her here—that’s their shared impression. So when Andy parks the truck they are both relieved to discover that she is smiling.
    The Joshua tree discovers that it
loves
to dance! Better even than church is the soft glow of the hexagonal dance floor. Swung around in strangers’ arms, Andy and Angie let themselves dance until they are sick, at the edge of the universe. Andy lets Angie buy him three shots of rum. A weather seizes them and blows them around—a weather you can order for a quarter, the jukebox song.
    It is a good night. Outside the dance hall, the parking lot is full of cars and trucks, empty of humans. The wind pushes into them, as hot as the blasts of air from a hand dryer. Angie draws Andy’s attention to the claret cup of the moon. “It looks red,” she says. And it does. Sitting on a stranger’s fender, listening to the dying strains of a pop song they both despise, Andy asks her softly, “What’s changed, Angie?”
    And when she doesn’t or can’t answer, he asks, “What’s changing now?”
    A question they like better, because at least its tense sounds more hopeful.
    The Joshua tree leafs out in her mind. Heat blankets her; for a moment she is sure she will faint. Her vision clears. “Bamboleo” plays inside the dance hall. Through the illuminated squares of its windows, they can see the waving wheat of the dancers’ upper bodies. Mouths gape in angry shock behind the frosted glass; they are only singing along to the music, Angie knows. Outside, the boy presses his mouth against hers. Now he is pressing every part of himself against the girl; inside her, his competitor presses back.
    â€œLet’s go. Let’s go. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
    â€œLet’s go back inside.”
    In the end, the three of them settle on a compromise: they dance in the empty parking lot, under stars that shoot eastward like lateral rain.
    For a second the Joshua tree can feel its grip on the host weakening. The present threatens its existence: the couple’s roaring happiness might dislodge the ghostly tree. So it renews its purchase on the girl, roots into her memory.
    â€œRemember our first day, Andy? The hike through Joshua Tree?”
    Compared with that
, Angie thinks,
what is there for us in the