Free The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 by Joe Hill

at the world in the same way anymore. A shrinking back, a momentary flinch, a hesitancy about it all.
    He asked the doctor about it the next day. He could tell from her expression that she knew the answer already but was reluctant to say. He pushed harder. “Does it mean something went wrong with the process?”
    â€œOf course not,” Dr. Avosh snapped. She shook her head. “We still don’t understand all the ways that personality is genetically determined.”
    â€œIf it’s genetically determined, then it would be the same,” he said.
    â€œIt’s considerably more complicated than that,” she said and began to explain, but he was already thinking of tortoiseshell cats and realizing what he had done.
    He couldn’t think of anywhere to go but his mother’s.
    Much to his surprise, she was sitting on the sofa with Taco on her lap.
    â€œI thought you gave her to Mrs. Green,” he said.
    She ran her hand over the soft fur, rubbing around the base of the cat’s ears. He could hear it purring from where he sat. “Just a loan,” she said. “Shall I make us some coffee?”
    They sat together, drinking it. The cat hopped back onto his mother’s lap and began to purr again. She patted it.
    â€œShe’s more loving, this time around,” she said.
    â€œThis time around?”
    â€œYes.” She shrugged and kept petting the cat.
    â€œI think Mindy is different this time around, too,” he said.
    She looked up, brows furrowed. “Is it possible?”
    He nodded at the cat in her lap. “It’s the same thing, as far as I can tell. Personality is random, at least some of it.”
    â€œBut she looks just the same.”
    He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yes, she does. They took great care in that regard. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used plastic surgery to correct any discrepancies. But they can’t do that with her personality.”
    â€œAnd you can’t tell her.”
    He shook his head.
    His mother smoothed her hand over the cat, whispered to it.
    â€œWhat’s that?” he said.
    â€œAsking her what she makes of this.”
    â€œBut you called her something.”
    She blushed. “Taco Tooto Cat. Not Taco, but Taco Too.”
    Not and yet and still.
    Like his Mindy. Who he could finally grieve for. Who he could finally meet for the first time.
    â€œAre you going to pretend?” his mother said.
    â€œNo,” he said. “I’m going to tell her. And tell her why she feels about me like she does. Then she can decide.”
    â€œDecide whether or not to keep things as they were?”
    â€œNo. Decide whether or not to begin.”

KAREN RUSSELL
The Bad Graft
    FROM
The New Yorker
    Â 
    I. Germination
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    The land looked flattened, as if by a rolling pin. All aspects, all directions. On either side of Highway 62, the sand cast up visions of evaporated civilizations, dissolved castles that lay buried under the desert. Any human eye, goggled by a car’s windshield, can graft such fantasies onto the great Mojave. And the girl and the boy in the Dodge Charger were exceptionally farsighted. Mirages rose from the boulders, a flume of dream attached to real rock.
    And hadn’t their trip unfolded like a fairy tale? the couple later quizzed each other, recalling that strange day, their first in California, hiking among the enormous apricot boulders of Joshua Tree National Park. The girl had got her period a week early and was feeling woozy; the boy kept bending over to remove a pebble from his shoe, a phantom that he repeatedly failed to find. Neither disclosed these private discomforts. Each wanted the other to have the illusion that they might pause, anywhere, at any moment, and make love. And while both thought this was highly unlikely—not in this heat, not at this hour—the possibility kept bubbling up, every place they touched. This was the only true