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play,” Mama said. “Darko, play with your
uncle.”
    Darko squirmed with discomfort. He wasn’t terribly good at it –
no comparison to his brother.
    “Come on,” Auntie Osewa said, “don’t be so shy.”
    Darko did better than he’d expected, or maybe Uncle was just
being nice to him. The contest between Uncle and Cairo was fierce,
and it seemed like it would never end. When Cairo got squashed, he
couldn’t bear the defeat and challenged his uncle to a rematch.
What intrigued Darko was the way Uncle Kweku had come to life with
the game.
    Laughing at the players’ antics, Auntie Osewa got up, said she
would be back in a moment, and went outside.
    Cairo and his uncle went another round. Auntie had been gone
longer than Darko thought she would be. When she returned, Uncle
Kweku and Cairo were just about ready to finish up the game.
    “Okay, I’m tired now,” Uncle said. “Cairo, you’re too good for
me.” He leaned back against the wall with a sigh. “Where did you
go, Osewa?”
    “I went to set the rabbit traps.”
    Darko, startled, looked sharply at her. Her voice had changed.
It wasn’t musical like before, and it shook slightly, like the
tremor of a leaf in a brief stir of breeze.
    “Those rabbits have been at our crops again,” she added. Her
eyelids fluttered very slightly. Darko saw that. It wasn’t a
mannerism. Auntie Osewa did not have such a mannerism. It was
something else.
    Whether a person’s voice felt like silk or sandpaper to Darko,
the texture did not vary much. The pitch could change, and so could
the volume or loudness, but the way it felt to him stayed
the same… unless . Unless the speaker was holding back an
emotion or hiding something.
    Or lying.
    Why would Auntie Osewa lie? Darko’s face grew warm, perhaps on
her behalf, or maybe because such an embarrassing thought should
even have entered his mind. No, she wouldn’t lie – not his Auntie
Osewa. Would she?

∨ Wife of the Gods ∧
Six
    A t the end of the
workday, Dawson went to the CID garage to get his assigned Toyota
Corolla and put away his motorbike in a secure spot. Before he went
home, he had two stops to make. The first was to his brother,
Cairo, who lived with Papa in Osu, a south-central district of
Accra.
    Once robust and naturally athletic, Cairo had been a paraplegic
now for twenty-five years. Whenever he thought about it, Dawson
experienced an eerie moment of unreality. He could still barely
believe it. The accident had happened in Accra three months after
the trip to Ketanu.
    ♦
    Mama sent Cairo to the corner kiosk to buy a tin of sardines.
He was starting across the street when she remembered something.
“Get some bread too!” she called out through the window. He turned
at her voice, walking backward and sideways at the same
time .
    “What did you say, Mama? ”
    She screamed as she saw what Cairo never did. The oncoming
car hit him hard. He went up over the roof of the car and down the
back .
    ♦
    Within seconds, Cairo was paralyzed from the waist down.
Yesterday the master of his own body, today immobile and dependent
on the care of others. Mentally the anguish was immeasurable, and
if anyone suffered as much as or even more than Cairo, it was Mama.
Her guilt was a living torment.
    Two years after Cairo’s accident, she took a trip to Ketanu and
never came back. She disappeared into thin air. Perhaps she could
not bear ever to look Cairo in the eye again, but perhaps that was
not it either. To this day, no one knew, and Dawson wondered about
it over and again.
    Jacob, Dawson’s father, was in his early sixties now, and he was
Cairo’s sole caretaker except for the occasional member of the
extended family who took over when Papa had to go out. Cairo made a
little bit of money carving wood face masks – the kind popular with
tourists. Dawson always felt guilty about how little he contributed
to Cairo’s everyday needs. The one rule he kept firm to the point
of superstition was he never left town