Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht

Author:Mary Helen Specht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Brandon had asked her to photograph his snow crystal project because Flan owed him for helping her get set up at the Climate Institute and because he still thought of her as a snow specialist. An Iceman. At Marsh, she and Brandon had both taken a class from a visiting atmosphere specialist who first introduced them to the hidden world overhead.

Flannery had always planned to return to the States and go on the job market as an ice specialist, like Brandon had, after the yearlong EOP in Nigeria was over. Then, Kunle told her how, growing up, full-moon nights were an opportunity to venture through the bush to nearby compounds and chase girls. He also told her a proverb from his village: when the moon is bright, even the lame wish to get up and dance. Falling in love with him was a lot like a full moon: everything suddenly looked different.

At the time, Kunle was still working on his PhD because it took so long to finish school in Nigeria. After decades of harsh dictatorships, even the best Nigerian universities no longer had adequate funding or laboratories for educating PhD candidates in much more than the abstractions of book science, and even the professors they had always seemed to be on strike. To make money for room and board, Kunle worked as a campus okada driver, wearing a bright orange vest and oversized helmet, ferrying students from the front gate to dorms and academic buildings on the back of a motorbike for thirty naira. Sometimes, Flannery showed up at the end of his shift; he’d free himself from the orange vest and they’d buzz outside the campus and into Adamanta for a beer before it was time for him to return the okada.

On the nights Kunle studied for exams at the building they called the Faculty, reading by the light of a rechargeable lantern, Flannery brought him suya grilled by vendors on the side of the road. They would sit on a concrete bench in the breezeway, devouring the thinly sliced peppered meat from its newspaper wrapping.

“I’m surprised an oyinbo can take the spice.”

“I’m from Texas. We have a thing called salsa.”

They talked about their childhood. How when she didn’t know the words in school choir, she’d mouth watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. How, as a boy, he had to hide in the yam fields to find a quiet spot to read.

Because they worked together on the EOP project, Flannery and Kunle kept their growing intimacy a secret at first. When Kunle stayed overnight at her place, he woke at dawn so he could sneak out before the campus roads filled with people.

Still lying in bed beneath the mosquito net, half awake, she watched him bathe in the tub across the room. Coated in suds, he scrubbed his body, hair lathered white like an old man’s before he dipped the plastic bowl into the bucket and poured water over himself in little sips. Toweling dry, he would turn to her, naked,

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