The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 by Joe Hill Page B

implores.
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    What saves the boy is such a simple thing. Andy props himself up on an elbow, pausing to steady his breath. He missed the moment when she slid the knife from the crumpled heap of his clothing; he has no idea that its blade is sparkling inches from his neck. Staring at Angie’s waxy, serious face, he is overcome by a flood of memories.
    â€œHey, Angie?” he asks, stroking the fine dark hairs along her arm. “Remember how we met?”
    One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.
    Angie has never had sticking power. She dropped out of high school; she walked out of the GED exam. Her longest relationship, prior to falling for Andy, was seven months. But then they’d met (no epic tale there—the game was on at a hometown bar), and something in her character was spontaneously altered.
    He remembers the song that was playing. He remembers ordering another round he could not afford—a freezing Yuengling for himself, ginger ale for her. They were sitting on the same wooden stools, battered tripods, that had supported the plans and commitments of the young in that town for generations.
    The Joshua tree flexes its roots. Desperately it tries to fix its life to her life. In the human mind, a Joshua’s spirit can be destroyed by the wind and radiation fluxes of memory. Casting its spectral roots around, the plant furiously reddens with a very human feeling: humiliation.
    What a thing to be undone by—golden hops and gingerroot, the clay shales of Pennsylvania!
    It loses its grip on her arm; the strength runs out of her tensed biceps.
    The girl’s fingers loosen; the knife falls, unnoticed, to the sand.
    The green invader is displaced by the swelling heat of their earliest happiness. Banished to the outermost reaches of Angie’s consciousness, the Joshua tree now hovers in agony, half forgotten, half dissolving, losing its purchase on her awareness and so on its own reality.
    â€œWhat a perfect night!” the couple agree.
    Angie stands and brushes sand from her skirt. Andy frowns at the knife, picks it up.
    â€œHappy anniversary,” he says.
    It is not their anniversary, but doesn’t it make sense for them to celebrate the beginning here? This desert hike marked the last point in space where they’d both wanted the same future. What they are nostalgic for is the old plan, the first one. Their antique horizon.
    Down the trail, up and down through time, the couple walk back toward the campground parking lot. Making plans again, each of them babbling excitedly over the other. Maybe Reno. Maybe Juneau.
    Andy jogs ahead to their loaner getaway vehicle.
    The Black Rock Canyon campground is one of the few places in the park where visitors can sleep amid the Joshua trees, soaking up the starlight from those complex crystals that have formed over millennia in the desert sky. Few of these campers are still outside their tents and RVs, but there is one familiar silhouette: it’s the ranger, who is warming his enormous feet, bony and perfectly white, by the fire pit. Shag covers the five-foot cactus behind him, which makes it look like a giant’s mummified thumb.
    â€œYou lovebirds again!” he crows, waving them over.
    Reluctantly, Andy doubles back. Angie is pleased, and frightened, that he remembers them.
    â€œHa! Guess you liked the hike.”
    For a few surreal minutes, standing before the leaping flames, they talk about the hike, the moths, the Joshua woodland. Andy is itching to be gone; already he is imagining giving notice at the saloon, packing up their house, getting back on the endlessly branching interstate. But Angie is curious. Andy is a little embarrassed, in fact, by the urgent tone of her questions. She wants to hear more about the marriage of the yucca moth and the Joshua—is theirs a doomed romance? Can’t the two species untwine, separate their