Invasive Species by Joseph Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

tumultuous.
    Pulling away a little, Megan smiled up at her. “There’s this thing that happens, love,” she said. “Experts call it ‘getting old.’”
    She had a point. How old was she now? Sixty-one? -two? Old enough that the years were beginning to take a toll, laying down lines across her forehead and around her mouth, turning her fair skin papery, bringing out spots on her hands. Megan had been too active throughout her life to ever develop severe osteoporosis, but she seemed a little more stooped than she had six months earlier, the last time Sheila had seen her.
    Still. There was more. A gray undertone to her skin. Something odd about the whites of her eyes.
    â€œI’ll examine you later,” Sheila told her.
    Megan laughed. “Oh, you flatterer,” she said. “You’ll have me in my grave before lunch.”
    Then she returned to her daughter’s inspection. “I like your hair,” she said. “What there is of it.”
    Since they’d last seen each other, six months earlier, Sheila had gotten tired of her long coppery ponytail. So she’d cut most of it off, giving herself something approaching a pixie cut.
    â€œHow about this?” she asked, half turning to reveal the new tattoo on the back of her left shoulder, peeking out from under her sleeveless white shirt. A regal sunbird with wings spread, all glittering green and yellow and red.
    Megan’s eyes widened. “How many is that?”
    â€œJust three.”
    â€œI remember,” her mother said, setting off toward the market, “when Ariel stickers were enough for you.”
    â€œLong time ago,” Sheila said.
    â€œSeems like yesterday to me.”
    *   *   *
    THEY STOPPED AT the stand run by the same old woman who’d been selling fried corn cakes with cane sugar sprinkled on top for as long as Sheila had been coming to the market. Twenty years it was now, ever since her mom and dad moved here on a three-year mission with the Presbyterian church, fell in love with the place, the people, the African light, and decided to stay.
    Twenty years out of Sheila’s twenty-nine. She could hardly imagine what it felt like not to live in Africa, which was another reason why, after graduating from medical school, she’d come back.
    She’d also wanted to be close to her parents, though not too close. On the same continent, at least.
    â€œA
shilingi
for your thoughts,” her mother said.
    Sheila smiled.
    â€œI’m still hungry,” she said.
    The market stalls sold corn cakes, wooden carvings, textiles, weapons . . . and bushmeat.
    The bodies of wild animals taken from the vanishing forests to the west and denuded savannas to the east. Hunted with bows and arrows and wire snares and Kalashnikov semiautomatics, then brought back to the towns and cities.
    Too many Africans still considered the eating of wild game a birthright, and would do so until all the game was gone.
    The crowd around the bushmeat tables was large and boisterous. Sheila, pausing, saw whole baby crocodiles; rain forest rats, piled four to a stick, with their mouths pulled back into rictus grins; civets smelling like swamp water; tiny antelopes with legs as delicate as green sticks; a sliding pile of algae-scummed river turtles, still barely alive.
    On the next table over were piles of smoked monkey meat, brown and dry like old leather. The guenons had been transported whole, their heads bent back over their bodies by the smoking process, while the larger mangabeys and colobuses had been hacked into steaks and burned-fur-covered limbs.
    Sheila had lost her appetite.
    Her mother’s hand touched her arm. “Let’s go, honey.”
    Sheila hesitated. Then, just as she made to turn away, the crowd stirred, parting before something new. Three living baby chimps, tied together with ropes, pulled by a slab-faced man in dusty cotton pants, a shirt that had once