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,
