The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 Quotes

“How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:

1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.
2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)
3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug.
4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.
5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use.
6. No one refurbishes broken robots.
7. Please self-terminate.”
― A. Merc Rustad, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“In the winter, when you’re cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Usually you can only catch the Sasquatch blur of your own legendary moments in the side mirrors.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Science Fiction stories are the dazzling flares we launch into the darkness, to catch a glimpse of the country before us and show us our way.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Every breath I take fills my throat with the infants of a thousand sea creatures, filtered by the bioscreens installed by the clever men who made me what I am today. I am not a baleen whale, but the krill and larvae I catch and keep in this manner will help to replace the calories my body burns to keep me warm this far below the sea.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“They’re all drylanders, they don’t understand how easy it is to go loose and fluid down here in the depths, how little rank and order seem to matter when you’re moving as a single beast with a dozen tails, two dozen arms, and trying all the while to keep yourself together, keep yourself unified, keep yourself whole. The chain of command dissolves under the pressure of the crushing deep, just as so many other things—both expected and unimagined—have already fallen away.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“CONDENSATION COVERS THE walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. The space is tight, confined, unyielding; it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. We are constantly envious of those who escape its limitations, and we fear for them at the same time, wishing them safe return to the reef, where they can be kept away from all the darkness and predations of the open sea.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Key doesn’t answer for a long time, thinking of all the ways she could respond. Of Obaachan Akiko and the affectionate nickname of lazy summers spent hiking in the mountains or pounding mochi in the kitchen. Of her half-Japanese mother and Hawai’ian father, of the ways history and identity and circumstance can shape a girl into half a woman, until someone—not a man—comes with a hundred thousand others like him and destroys anything that might have once had meaning. So she finds meaning in him. Who else was there? And this girl, whose sneer reveals her bucked front teeth, has as much chance of understanding that world as Key does of understanding this one. Fresh fruit on the table. No uniforms. And a perfect, glittering shunt of plastic and metal nestled in the crook of her left arm. “Mine,” Key answers the girl.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“They are both silent, doubt and grief and fury scuttling between them like beetles in search of a meal. Tetsuo and the girl stare at each other with such deep familiarity that Key feels forgotten, alone—almost ashamed of the dreams that have kept her alive for a decade. They have never felt so hopeless, or so false. “Her name is Key,” Tetsuo says, in something like defeat. He turns away, though he makes no move to leave. “She will be your new caretaker.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“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.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“I can Leap back, the plant thinks. Angie can no longer see what she is doing. Her eyes are shut, her thoughts have stopped. One small hand rests on Andy’s neck; the other fist withdraws until the knife points earthward. Down, down, down, the invader demands. Something sighs sharply, and it might be Andy or it might be the entire forest. Leap, Leap, Leap, the Joshua implores.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“All the girl could remember was the terrible, irremediable tension between wanting to be somewhere and wanting to be nowhere. And the plant, crazed by its proximity to rich familiar soil, tried repeatedly to Leap out of her. This caused her hand to lift, holding a long knife, and plummet earthward, rooting into the fleshy chest of her lover, feeling deeper and deeper for moisture. The Joshua tree’s greatest victory over the couple comes four months into their stay: they sign a lease. A bungalow on the outskirts of the national park, with a fence to keep out the coyotes and an outdoor shower. When the shower water gets into their mouths, it tastes like poison. Strange reptiles hug the fence posts, like colorful olives on toothpicks. Andy squeezes Angie’s hand and returns the gaze of these tiny monsters; he feels strangely bashful as they bugle their throats at him. Four months into his desert sojourn, and he still doesn’t know the name of anything. Up close, the bungalow looks a lot like a shed. The bloated vowels of his signature on the landlord’s papers make him think of a large hand blurring underwater.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Her heels grind uselessly into the carpet. Her toes curl at the fibers. She stands in the quiet womb of the room, waiting for a signal from the root brain, the ancient network from which the invader has been exiled. She lifts her arms until they are fully extended, her fingers turned outward. Her ears prick up like sharp leaves, alert for moisture.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal. But increasingly she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One light bulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism? The light bulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“His own eyes prickle wetly. His blond hair darkens with sweat; pearls of water stand out on his smooth six-year-old forehead. The longer he stares back, the wider the gaze seems to get, like a grin. Her eyes radiate hard spines of heat, which drill into him. Timmy Babson feels punctured, “seen.” “Jane!” Timmy screams for his mother, calling for her by her first name for the first time. “Jane, Jane! It’s looking”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Without understanding exactly how the trap got sprung, he can feel its teeth in him.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“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.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“But other creatures of the desert do seem to apprehend what is happening. Through the crosshairs of its huge pupils, a tarantula watches Angie’s skin drink in the danger: the pollen from the Joshua mixes with the red blood on her finger. On a fuchsia ledge of limestone, a dozen lizards witness the Leap. They shut their gluey eyes as one, sealing their lucent bodies from contagion, inter-kingdom corruption.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“the plant that is the park’s namesake. The Joshua trees look hilariously alien. Like Satan’s telephone poles. They’re primitive, irregularly limbed, their branches swooning up and down, sparsely covered with syringe-thin leaves—more like spines, Angie notes. Some mature trees have held their insane poses for a thousand years; they look as if they were on drugs and hallucinating themselves.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Dire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“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.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“After dinner Andy drives drowsily, weaving slightly. Sand, sand, sand—all that pulverized time. Eons ago the world’s burst hourglass spilled its contents here; now the years pile and spin, waiting with inhuman patience to be swept into some future ocean. Sand washes right up to the paved road, washes over to the other side in a solid orange current, illuminated by their headlights.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“her boyfriend when he tells her they are gypsies, two moths drunk on light, darting from the flower of one red sunset to the next; but several times she’s dozed off in the passenger seat and awakened from traitorous dreams of her old bedroom, soft pillows.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“The trip was a kind of honeymoon. The boy and girl were eloping. They weren’t married, however, and had already agreed that they never would be—they weren’t that kind of couple. The boy, Andy, was a reader; he said that they were seafarers, wanderers. “Ever unfixed,” a line from Melville, was scraped in red ink across the veins of his arm. The girl, Angie, was three years sober and still struggling to find her mooring on dry land. On their first date they had decided to run away together. Andy bought a stupidly huge knife; Angie had a tiny magenta flashlight suspended on a gold chain, which she wore around her throat. He was twenty-two, she had just turned twenty-six. Kids were for later, maybe. They could still see the children they had been: their own Popsicle-red smiles haunting them.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“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 protection they’d brought with them as they walked deeper into the blue-gold Mojave.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“He remembered buying them for her. The two of them together at the farmers’ market, wandering from stall to stall, buying bread rounds still warm from baking and bags of vegetables still thick with dirt and leaves. The way she managed to look at every display, ferreted out everything interesting, made people smile as she talked to them.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Even if she got the messages, she’s probably all “Oh man, Ursula’s just having one of those days,” which is something I overheard her telling our mother once, just because I was upset that she didn’t want to be my maid of honor. Not that it mattered in the end, with the wedding being called off, but it was upsetting nonetheless. I’m so fucking tired.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“This is the thing about my sister and I: we’ve never gotten along, even when we’ve gotten along. This is what happens when you have parents who fetishize family, and the viscosity of blood relative to water: you resent the force with which they push you together with this person who is, genetics aside, a stranger. And that’s what my sister is: a stranger.”
― Joe Hill, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015