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

bodies from contagion, inter-­kingdom corruption.
    During a season of wild ferment, a kind of atmospheric accident can occur: the extraordinary moisture stored in the mind of a passing animal or hiker can compel the spirit of a Joshua to Leap through its own membranes. The change is metaphysical: the tree’s spirit is absorbed into the migrating consciousness, where it lives on, intertwined with its host.
    Instinct guides its passage now, through the engulfing darkness of Angie’s mind. Programmed with the urgent need to plug itself into some earth, the plant’s spirit goes searching for terra firma.
    Andy unzips his backpack, produces Fiji water and a Snoopy Band-Aid.
    â€œYour nose got burned,” he says, and smiles at her.
    And at this juncture she can smile back.
    He kisses the nose.
    â€œC’mon, let’s get out of here.”
    Then something explodes behind her eyelids into a radial green fan, dazzling her with pain. Her neck aches, her abdomen. The pain moves lower. It feels as if an umbrella were opening below her navel. Menstrual cramps, she thinks. Seconds later, as with a soldering iron, an acute and narrowly focused heat climbs her spine.
    At first the Joshua tree is elated to discover that it’s alive:
I survived my Leap. I was not annihilated. Whatever “I” was.
    Grafted to the girl’s consciousness, the plant becomes aware of itself. It dreams its green way up into her eyestalks, peers out:
    Standing there, in the mirror of the desert, are a hundred versions of itself. Here is its home: a six-armed hulk, fibrous and fruiting obscenely under a noon sun. Here is the locus that recently contained this tree spirit. For a tree, this is a dreadful experience. Its uprooted awareness floats throughout the alien form. It concentrates itself behind Angie’s eyeballs, where there is moisture. This insoluble spirit, this refugee from the Joshua tree, understands itself to have leapt into hell. The wrong place, the wrong vessel. It pulses outward in a fuzzy frenzy of investigation, flares greener, sends out feelers. Compared with the warm and expansive desert soil, the human body is a cul-de-sac.
    This newborn ghost has only just begun to apprehend itself when its fragile tenancy is threatened: Angie sneezes, rubs at her temple. Unaware that this is an immunologic reflex, she is convulsed by waves of nostalgia for earlier selves, remote homes. Here, for some reason, is her childhood backyard, filled with anarchic wildflowers and bordered by Pennsylvania hemlock.
    Then the pain dismantles the memory; she holds her head in her hand, cries for Andy.
    This is the plant, fighting back.
    The girl moans.
    â€œAndy, you don’t have any medicine? Advil . . . something?”
    The vegetable invader feels the horror of its imprisonment. Its new host is walking away from the Joshua-tree forest, following Andy. What can this kind of survival mean?
    Although they don’t know it, escape is now impossible for our vagabonding couple. Andy opens the sedan door, Angie climbs in, and in the side mirrors the hundreds of Joshuas shrink away into hobgoblin shapes.
    â€œAngie? You got so quiet.”
    â€œIt’s the sun. My head is killing me, honey.”
    Dispersed throughout her consciousness, the tree begins to grow.
    Andy has no clue that he is now party to a love triangle. What he perceives is that his girlfriend is acting very strangely.
    â€œDo you need some water? Want to sit and rest awhile?”
    Â 
    At the motel, the girl makes straight for the bathroom faucet. She washes down the water with more water, doesn’t want to eat dinner. When Andy tries to undress her, she fights him off. Her movements seem to him balletic, unusually nimble; yet, walking across the room, she pauses at the oddest moments. That night she basks in the glow of their TV as if it were the sun. Yellow is such a relief.
    â€œI hate this show,” the boy says, staring not at the