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  The mostly teenage kaya girls either balanced on their heads metal “China” pans coated in chipping plastic, weighted with the purchases of patrons they were muling for, or scanned for customers with pouncing eyes. Some worked with babies strapped to their backs with faded cloth. Ken noticed AMA inspectors chatting some kayayei up, grazing them, patting them, blocking their paths.

  Maneuvering through the walkways like the reluctant market boy he once was, Ken found the Munhwɛ setup with relative ease. Four rows of pink plastic chairs faced a wooden stage, and the clipboard-wielding woman on it was directing a camera crew into position. Ken moved behind the platform, hoping to find a supervisor to note his punctuality.

  He quickened his gait when he saw Inspector Quarcoo. The senior officer was engaged in what looked like a serious discussion with another uniform. Ken slowed his steps, surprised to see Duah with him, holding a pair of boots.

  “I found someone on the roadside trying to sell them,” Duah said. He placed the boots on a table and peeled back one tongue, revealing Charles’s name.

  “Maybe he gave them to the seller?” Ken said. “Charles is too big for someone to steal them off his feet.” He turned to Inspector Quarcoo to see if he agreed.

  “Look at them,” Duah said.

  Then Ken saw the blood.

  * * *

  Returning to her stall after a brief walk down the row, Muni dabbed her trickling hairline. A musky odor was aloft, and she knew Asana was now in the tight confines of the storeroom. She used her Munhwɛ flyer to wave away the smell, then dipped her nose in her handbag, inhaling the mingled notes of used perfumed strips.

  “You’ve been using the deodorant I gave you?”

  Asana looked up from the pan she was hurriedly filling with water sachets. “Yes, Auntie Muni.”

  Then why your foul smell? Muni didn’t ask because she wanted to know instead if Asana had entertained Ibrahim in her stall. With impatience, she squinted at her employee and tenant. “Your pan will be too heavy.”

  The girl, still packing on her knees, looked up again. “Sorry?”

  “Asana, did you have someone in my shop overnight?”

  Muni watched Asana spread her arms, fasten each hand on either side of the pan, and raise it to her head in one motion.

  “Never, Auntie Muni,” she said almost too coolly. “Please, can I go? I saw that the Munhwɛ people brought bottled water for the crowd, but the sun is growing hot. People will need more.”

  “You cleaned this place very well, Asana. You used a different soap. Where did you get it?”

  “Mr. Selifu.”

  “The butcher? Or one of his assistants?”

  “I knew the AMA people would be here this morning so I couldn’t just sweep. I had to scrub. But the Dettol was finished. I’m always seeing Mr. Selifu’s boy scrubbing, so I asked him for some cleaning solution.”

  “Which boy?”

  Asana’s eyes bored into Muni’s. “Jonathan.”

  Muni watched her kaya girl stagger slightly under the weight of the pan as she reached for the bottle.

  “I’ll take it back to him.”

  “You go and sell. I will return it to Mr. Selifu.”

  Asana stepped out of the stall into the bright hot chaos, before turning her head gingerly to face her landlady. “Oh, Auntie Muni, I have to go home for a few days. Someone has died.”

  Muni hated to lose Asana even for a short while. “Maybe your friend can step in while you’re gone?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  As Asana retreated, Muni’s phone lit up with her son’s picture. “Abdul, where are you?”

  Background noise answered.

  “Did I tell you and your sister to come here for Munhwɛ TV? Come at once!” She would go to Ibrahim when the children relieved her. She resumed fanning herself as a woman walked into her shop.

  “Hello, madam,” Muni sang the greeting, hawking the customer’s hesitation at a diamanté-studded bolt of teal and fuchsia fabric cut into connected leaves. “Swiss lace. Authentic.”

  When the woman walked out, Muni took out her phone and opened WhatsApp.

  Where r u?! She shook the soap bottle impatiently until her son and daughter startled her.

  Muni immediately left the kids to watch the shop, bounding outside. Her hairline sprouted more sweat with the exertion, the trickles streaking her foundation, beading under her chin. She mopped the drops, stopping absently to finger a pack of plastic-wrapped yaki weave dangling from the hair-braiding stall she passed. Her profuse sweating cost her so much in hair and blotting papers, she lamented as she walked on, fluffing her synthetic curls.

  She took the long way to Mr. Selifu’s, asking herself why she was so shaken by the prospect of Asana lying; that Ibrahim, not Jonathan, had given her the cleaning solution, and perhaps something more. If Ibrahim had done something with Asana, he was free to. Muni was a married woman with children close to his age. And if he hadn’t done anything with Asana—her heart beat with hope—then it was just as Asana had said.

  When she reached the butcher’s, Muni’s eyes immediately sought Ibrahim.

  “Mr. Selifu!” She projected for Ibrahim’s benefit.

  “Auntie Muni?” The old man looked up from the warped wooden table he was carefully slicing goat flesh on. Ibrahim and Jonathan stood at opposite sides of the table behind him.

  It seemed impossible to Muni that Ibrahim was the same age as his fellow apprentice. At seventeen, Jonathan looked like a child playing doctor in his blood-spattered butcher’s coat as he scrubbed a shaved lamb. But Ibrahim made her slick with longing, even under a cloud of flies, hacking at a mountain of meat.

  It wasn’t just his nearly two-meter height—tall even for the taller northern people—it was his carriage. He never slouched. Meanwhile, Jonathan stood half-folded into an almost fetal stance, practically begging for permission to exist.

  “How can I help you, Auntie Muni?”

  She retrieved the bottle from her bag. “I wanted to return the detergent your boy Jonathan loaned my tenant Asana.” Her eyes darted to Ibrahim’s face, to see if he showed any emotion. She exhaled when he didn’t. “I ran out of Dettol and she needed to clean. National Sanitation Day and all.”

  Mr. Selifu nodded dismissal, taking the bottle.

  “Isn’t that an awful lot of meat you have these boys taking care of, Mr. Selifu?” she said, her eyes still on Ibrahim and the meat he was methodically chopping.

  “These days people like smaller cuts. They’re cheaper.” He turned back to his work.

  Ibrahim winked at Auntie Muni.

  Can I c u 2night? she texted him when she left. Asana has traveled.

  * * *

  Asana squeezed her throat and raised her pitch as she milled through the crowd of onlookers who hadn’t been able to afford tickets to the live episode of Munhwɛ TV’s new reality dating competition, Am I Your Size?

  “Pyoooor water!” she cried, passing a group of dusty boys performing an elaborate sideshow of dance moves to beats blaring from the sound system.

  “Ma me nsuo mmienu,” a man ordered.

  She traded him two sachets for sixty pesewas and called again, her voice wavering slightly as she passed a huddle of police officers. Her eyes nearly jumped from their sockets when she saw Charles’s boots. She locked eyes with one of the policemen, the single jagged stripe on his shoulder conjuring the bloodied stripes on the dead man’s shirt.

  The officer signaled to her with a sharp whistle, but Asana hastened away with tangled legs, pretending she didn’t hear. He ran to catch her and plucked three sachets from her pan.

  “Ken, there’s bottled water here,” another uniform called after him.

  “Wonim mpaboa yi?” the officer named Ken asked, pointing to the table where the boots rested.

  “Do I know boots?” she repeated, dumbly.

  “Do you know these boots? There’s a name on them. Charles Gyampoh.”

  She swallowed her panic. “No.”

>   “We know he was seeing a few of you kayayei.”

  Asana’s knees trembled as a kayayo coming from Mr. Selifu’s passed them, her pan heavy with meat. Another followed two paces behind.

  “I don’t know the boots.”

  Walking away, her ears pricked at the officer’s words to his colleagues: “We have to turn this market upside down. Charles is too big to just disappear. It would take several strong men to overpower him or move him somewhere if he is dead. If he died in Mal’ Atta last night, his body is in this market or close by.”

  * * *

  Limah stopped at the butcher’s stall behind the madam who had hired her. The woman momentarily removed the sugarcane cob from her jaw to order oxtail.

  When the meat was weighed, wrapped, and placed in Limah’s pan, she announced playfully, “Mr. Selifu, that’s it. You’ve taken all my money.”

  The butcher chuckled. “You and your mountains of money? Madam, how can I take all?”

  The madam tipped her head at Limah in a let’s go gesture, and resumed sucking the cob she had long drained.

  Limah trailed her, her head heavy with meat, yam tubers, tomatoes, onions, ginger, okra, and garden eggs, and her neck straining as Adama drooped with sleep on her back. Her body was ready to drop, but her mind was awake. She could still see Charles’s blood caked under her nails, could still hear Ibrahim chopping him into steaks.

  “We can’t let anyone buy this thinking this is goat or cow,” Limah had said.

  “I will drop small bits to the floor, add it to the slop people request for their dogs, maybe add some when someone orders a lot of meat,” Ibrahim conceded.

  “The main thing is, there will be no body,” Asana had said. “While they are watching Ahmed Razak, while they are giving us meat to kaya, one by one, we—they—will be removing Officer Charles.”

  Limah almost dropped her pan when the madam stopped short.

  “This Munhwɛ thing is blocking everything. Look at this nonsense.”

  A corpulent woman on all fours was onstage. Her buttocks facing the crowd, she jerked to the rhythm the deejay spliced. Ahmed Razak was on his feet on the dais. Praises, insults, and howls erupted through the assembly of two hundred or so packed on the pink chairs, and from those watching from the periphery.

  When she finished displaying her gluteal muscle control, lifting and dropping each cheek to the staccato track, the contestant leaned into the microphone and asked coyly, “Am I your size?”

  Razak raised two thumbs and the crowd roared. “FAT-ULOUS!”

  Limah followed the madam around the stage, passing the public toilets and a man urinating against a wall dripping red with the painted directive, Do Not Urinate Here, by Order of AMA.

  It was now nine a.m. and National Sanitation Day was effectively over, AMA inspectors conceding the mess inherent in human exchange and the special case of the Munhwɛ event. Limah felt discarded water sachets crunch under her chale wote as she stepped gingerly over gutters oozing with runoff from washed hands, cups, and hair.

  When they reached the market exit on Adomi Street, Limah motioned for help. Two small girls ran up as she lowered herself carefully so they could lift the pan and put it on the ground. The madam yelled into her phone—“Peter, ah! Where are you?”—as an ancient bottle-green Mercedes slowed in front of them.

  Limah and her helpers unloaded into the Benz’s trunk.

  When they were done, the madam, now seated in the vehicle, searched her bag. “One for you, you, and you.”

  Limah glared at the coin in her hand.

  “Hwɛ! You won’t be grateful?” The madam threw her desiccated sugarcane cob through her open window.

  Clutching her pan at her side, Limah watched the madam roll up her window, a hairline fracture tracing an arc in the glass that separated them. A small smile surprised Limah as she imagined the madam preparing the meat she’d just bought. She retreated as the car slowly pulled away.

  Shape-Shifters

  by Adjoa Twum

  Pig Farm

  The hawker points wildly toward a crowd forming on the other side of the road. Intrigued, I find myself joining the throngs of people from the night market who have abandoned their stations to investigate the source of the commotion. I elbow my way through the sea of onlookers, too entranced by the hum of suspense to protest. I end up at the entrance of a large storm drain. Children love rummaging through the sewage for discarded tires to play with, more often emerging with used condoms that they gleefully blow up like balloons.

  In the belly of the drain, two uniformed men intensely dig through its rotten contents. They heave something out of its crevices and deposit it gracelessly onto the road. The crowd steps back, permitting the headlights of a passing car to illuminate the object—a corpse. Its throat has been slashed, the blood coagulated around its neck like a grotesque pendant. Its coarse hair shrouds its face. Its body is bloated from marinating in the dank water. Some spectators clasp their hands on their heads and wail. Others kneel in prayer against whatever evil is responsible.

  I disengage. I cautiously approach the body. I nudge its shoulder with my toe, the force causing it to roll back slightly, exposing its face.

  “No . . . no . . . no . . .” I moan softly, recoiling from those familiar vacant eyes. I let out a guttural cry. I scream until I’m hoarse, until I have no air left to form another sound. “Help! Somebody help me, please!”

  No one does.

  ⚜

  A firework rocket announces its launch, rousing me from a violent sleep. I sit up, perspiration binding my thick coils to my forehead. I do not recall my dream, but the terror lingers. Disoriented, I tilt my head toward the dusty screened window. Outside, the starless sky bursts in breathtaking hues of crimson, sapphire, and gold. A typical Pig Farm New Year’s Eve celebration rages on. Melodic highlife music blares from one of the many open-air bars. From the raucous laughter and effusive banter that occasionally cut through the musician’s nasal vibrato, I can tell that libations are flowing. A prophet clangs a bell up and down the street. His voice quaking with urgency, he warns of the end of days and calls for all to repent. His premonitions are met with indifference by people too consumed with the night’s shenanigans to worry about the Rapture.

  I know how it feels to be unacknowledged. I have gotten used to reintroducing myself to people I have already met. I no longer take it personally. My own parents admit they did not enroll me in nursery school on time because they had simply forgotten. This particular transgression broke my heart. These days, I use my lack of presence to study people intimately in plain sight; their fears and inspirations. I come alive when I embody their greatest desires.

  I have parlayed this skill into a career as a “good-time girl.” But like all other mistresses, sycophants, and bottom-feeders, during the holidays I am without purpose. I spend most days languishing on my mattress, comforted only by the scent of past lovers trapped within its fibers.

  A sudden coughing fit breaks my sober reflections. I wheeze until my throat is raw. I decide to stop by the local drugstore.

  As soon as I cross the threshold of my rented chamber and hall, I am greeted by the overpowering stench of sunbaked feces. I wrinkle my nose in disgust. Although I’ve been living here for the past three years, I refuse to accept the inhumane conditions that force tenants to empty their chamber pots directly onto the streets. I hopscotch around the dark puddles staining the red earth and turn westward into a narrow alley. I amble past rows of aging compound homes nearly identical to the one I just left. Same leaky corrugated-tin roofs; same adinkra symbols welded imperfectly onto rusting wrought-iron gates; same urine-splashed walls. I run my hands gently along their cool, grainy exterior in appreciation of their sturdiness despite the degradation they endure daily. These structures are probably no different from the people who inhabit them, devalued yet resilient. Many of them labor thanklessly as factory hands, petty traders, and mechanics, yet they persist, determined to make it.

  A
thin piece of beached wood precariously balancing over a wide uncovered manhole grants me safe passage onto Kotobabi Main Road. I take a moment to savor the town’s unbridled energy.

  The bushy eyebrows of a kebab seller furrow as he carefully places his meat skewers on top of a scorching coal grill, the crackling fat shooting sparks into the air.

  A resounding “GOAL!” erupts from a cracked television propped in the doorway of an electronics repair shop where a group of men are gathered. The announcement is met with cheering and dancing from supporters of the winning team, mixed with objections, jeers, and curses from the sore losers. A fight will soon break out. I move on.

  Three young boys, dressed only in shorts made from repurposed flour sacks, zigzag between the legs of the stalls, squealing with excitement. Nearby, their mother molds fermented corn into kenkey, the embers from her coal pot casting a haunting glow on her worn face. I pause briefly here, hypnotized by the smoke dancing out of her crude kerosene lamp.

  This is Pig Farm.

  This neighborhood is an outcast’s haven, dating back to the days of the swineherds who inhabited the land before finding themselves on the wrong side of industrialization. Their livelihood threatened by the introduction of industrial abattoirs, they morphed into the backbone of Ghana’s burgeoning economy; making, selling, and fixing things. Today, migrants converge here from across the country to exploit its cheap rent and proximity to business hubs.

  A police truck roars past me, its side-view mirror grazing my elbow. I cry out, but it thunders onward, leaving in its wake a cloud of soot that triggers my cough again.

  I look up just as a street hawker sprints past me, yelling, “Hurry, hurry!” A crowd follows him, their interest piqued. I change course and join them.

  ⚜

  I must have dozed off. I quickly scan the hall. Everything appears as it was. The TV is still airing telenovela reruns. My screen door is still ajar to let in the harmattan breeze. On my coffee table lies an envelope stuffed with cash—enough to sustain me for another eighteen months. Each grimy note is intact. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I am not alone. In two determined strides, I’m standing outside my dark bedroom. Nothing looks out of place there either, but my intuition tells me otherwise. I enter.