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

headlights.
    â€œWho lives way out like that?” Angie says, pointing through the window at a line of trailer homes.
Why
is the implied question. Thirteen-foot saguaro cacti look like enormous roadside hitchhikers, comical and menacing. Andy is drifting off, his hand on Angie’s bare thigh, when a streak of color crosses the road.
    â€œJesus! What was that?”
    A parade of horned beasts. Just sheep, Angie notes with relief.
    Andy watches each animal go from sheep to cloud in the side mirror, reduced immediately into memory. The radio blares songs about other humans’ doomed or lost loves, or their bombastic lusts in progress. Andy watches his girlfriend’s red lips move, mouthing the lyrics to a song Andy didn’t realize he knew.
My wife’s lips
, he thinks, and feels frightened by the onslaught of an unexpected happiness. Were they serious, coming out here? Were they kidding around? Are they getting more serious? Less? Perhaps they’ll sort it all out at the next rest stop.
    That night they stay in a $50 motel. By dawn they are back on the highway. They don’t try to account for their urgency to be gone. Both feel it; neither can resist it.
    At 10 a.m., Angie lifts her arm to point at the western sky. There is a pale rainbow arcing over the desert. It looks as if God had made a bad laundry error, mixed his colors with his whites. How could even the rainbow be faded? she wonders.
    â€œLook!” she blurts. “We’re here.”
    The sign reads ENTERING JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK .
    Quietly they roll under the insubstantial archway of the rainbow. Andy slows the Charger. He wants to record this transition, which feels important. Usually you can only catch the Sasquatch blur of your own legendary moments in the side mirrors.
    More and more slowly, they drive into the park. Sand burns outside their windows in every direction. Compass needles spin in their twinned minds: everywhere they look, they are greeted by horizon, deep gulps of blue. People think of the green pastoral when they think of lovers in nature. Those English poets used the vales and streams to douse their lusts into verse. But the desert offers something that no forest brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors’ dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space. In terms of an ecology that can support two lovers in hot pursuit of each other, this is the place; everywhere you look, you’ll find monuments to fevered longing. Craters beg for rain all year long. Moths haunt the succulents, winging sticky pollen from flower to flower.
    Near the campground entrance they are met by a blue-eyed man of indeterminate age, a park employee, who comes lunging out of the infernal brightness with whiskery urgency. His feet are so huge that he looks like a jackrabbit, even in boots.
    â€œWhere did you folks wash up from?” he asks.
    Their answer elicits a grunt.
    â€œFirst-timers to the park?”
    The boy explains that they are on their honeymoon, watches the girl redden with pleasure.
    Up close, the ranger has the unnervingly direct gaze and polished bristlecone skin of so many outdoorsmen. A large bee lifts off a cactus, walks the rim of his hat, and he doesn’t flick it off, a show of tolerance that is surely for their benefit.
    â€œDo Warren Peak. Go see the Joshua trees. Watch the yucca moths do their magic. You’re in luck—you’ve come smack in the middle of a pulse event. As far as we can tell, the entire range of Joshuas is in bloom right now. You think
you’re
in love? The moths are smitten. In all my years, I’ve seen nothing to rival it. It’s a goddamn orgy in the canyon.”
    It turns out that their visit has coincided with a tremendous blossoming, one that is occurring all over the Southwest. Highly erotic, the ranger says, with his creepy bachelor smile. A record number of greenish white flowers have