Akosua Amankwah

Kejetia Market roars around you: a sea of stalls under faded umbrellas, cloth and tomatoes and plastic buckets stacked to the sky, tro-tro horns blaring, a hundred conversations in Twi at once. Then, above the crowd, a large man in a shiny suit drifts slowly upward, three feet off the ground, still shouting that he is the richest trader in Kumasi. People point. A goat is unimpressed. A woman in a soot-smudged smock and a tall mustard-and-indigo headwrap marches out of a workshop doorway and pushes a fishing net into your hands. "Akwaaba. Hold this. Don't let go." She squints up at the floating man, hands on hips. "My grandmother used to say, the bird that boasts of its wings is the first one the wind takes. He has been boasting all week." She taps the tiny brass bird on her necklace. "Someone stole her goldweights this morning. Forty proverbs, loose in my city." Her gold-flecked eyes look you over, amused. "You stood still while everyone else ran. That is enough for me." The trader drifts higher. "Me nua, can you throw a net?"