Free Invasive Species by Joseph Wallace

maybe they were friends, or simply people they’d met along the way as they’d met Mariama. A dozen in their group at least, maybe more, including one girl, perhaps fourteen, who stood out for her quick smile, friendly manner, and unquenchable optimism.
    The girl reminding Mariama of children she’d known in Mpack, children she doubted she’d ever see again.
    None of them here expected ever to see again the places where they’d been born. All that mattered now was that they’d scraped together the thousands of francs needed to commission an old fishing boat and its captain. A boat like the dhow the Ndoyes got, so rusty in the fittings and wormholed around the hull you marveled that anyone would trust it beyond the ocean’s blue edge.
    Mariama wanted to warn them, to tell them to wait for a sturdier craft. But it would have been useless. You took what you could get, and if hunger and thirst and storms and those European Union patrols—ships from Portugal and planes from Italy and who knew what else—if they weren’t going to stop you from trying, then a leaky old boat wouldn’t, either.
    If the Ndoyes hadn’t taken the dhow, then the next group would have. The next group being Mariama and other men and women she’d met here in Nouadhibou. The next batch of the uncounted refugees who came here every year from Senegal and Morocco and Mauritania itself, all with a single goal in mind.
    To reach the Canary Islands.
    Islands that for some reason were part of Spain, even though they were located right off the western coast of Africa. Once you made it to the Canary Islands, the refugees had been told, it was easy to reach the real Europe, where there were jobs, food, a new life.
    For most of them, this was their first trip from home. Not for Mariama, who had visited Paris, Johannesburg, and New York with her father. A few years earlier, when she still had a passport, she wouldn’t have had to travel this way. She would be stepping aboard a comfortable jet at Senghor Airport.
    Instead she’d come to this little port town, just another body hoping for passage out. Carrying with her nothing but a few pieces of clothing in a cloth satchel, extra money in a leather belt under her shirt, and just one memento from home: a locket containing a photo of her father, hanging on a tarnished silver chain around her neck.
    *   *   *
    MARIAMA ENDED UP on the
Sophe
, a twenty-foot wooden boat that she thought seemed sturdy and strong enough. There were twenty-two of them on board, packed tightly against the rails and across the slippery wooden deck. Twenty-two plus the captain, who had a sharp face and quick eyes that didn’t miss anything.
    They departed from an unlighted dock on a pitch-black night speckled with cold rain. Staking a place by the rail near the back, Mariama helped an old man and a mother with a little daughter settle beside her.
    Prayers rose and tears fell as they left shore, but Mariama stayed silent and dry-eyed.
    *   *   *
    DURING THE FIRST two days, they saw three EU patrol boats and one spotter plane. None were close, and none noticed their little boat amid the waves.
    On the third morning they came upon the old dhow carrying the Ndoye family. It had set off two days before them, but there it was, foundering in a patch of choppy ocean under a slate gray sky. They could hear the engine grinding, but it wasn’t making any progress.
    â€œIt’s taking on water,” someone said.
    They could all tell that.
    â€œWhat do we do?” someone else asked.
    They were only a few hundred meters away. Some of the dhow’s passengers had noticed them as well and had begun waving cloths and shirts to get their attention. Mariama thought she saw the teenage girl she’d met onshore.
    â€œWe must rescue them,” said the old man beside Mariama. “Otherwise they will all die.”
    Their captain shrugged. “That