Shoes for the road

Chapter Two: Shoes for the Road

Morning found Accra loud again, as if the night had never learned to whisper. Vendors sang prices into the wide air, tro-tros argued with their own engines, and somewhere a brass band rehearsed the future in stumbling, joyful loops. Benjamin woke with the feeling you get after a fever breaks—light, uncertain, new in his own skin.

He lay still in his narrow bed, listening. The apartment carried its usual symphony: Christel humming in the kitchen, kettle insisting, a neighbor’s mop slapping rhythm across the corridor. Beneath it all, something else breathed—a low river of sound, not quite a voice, like memory wearing shoes.

Blessed by death, Badra-Kali had said. Crossings, bridges, costs.

His phone blinked to life: a message from Louis, three words and a heart. Here if you. Nathaniel had sent a video of a cat destroying a houseplant and a caption: Training montage idea? Ciska, predictably, had sent instructions. Meet me 9 a.m. by Makola. Wear comfortable footwear. This is a shoes mission.

Benjamin laughed into his pillow. Shoes. He had said it as a joke, but the word stuck. Belonging is a road. I am giving you shoes. He pictured something absurd—sandals woven from moonlight, boots that tied themselves—but when he swung his feet to the floor, the tile was only tile and his slippers only slippers. The sacred, it seemed, did not interrupt chores.

By the time he reached the kitchen, Christel had produced eggs and bread and the kind of look that said questions could wait for toast. She poured tea into his chipped mug. “You slept?”

“I dreamed,” Benjamin said, then took the safer route. “I’m okay.”

Christel inspected his face as if reading a map. “You don’t have to be brave with me.”

“I’m not. I’m… curious.”

“Curious I can work with.” She slid the plate across. “Eat. Your friends will drag you into mischief, and mischief goes better on a full stomach.”

“Is Dad—”

“At work,” she said. Something unspoken held its breath between them, then sat down politely and waited. “He’ll ask tonight. Decide what you want to give him.”

Benjamin nodded. The apartment’s thin walls seemed suddenly thick with decision. He ate, washed his plate, kissed Christel’s temple, and stepped into the day.

The sun already had opinions. By 8:45, the air wavered with heat and fragrance—spice and petrol and pineapple. At Makola, color exploded—cloth like a parade, stacks of tomatoes shining like coins, sellers calling blessings and bargains with equal conviction. Ciska was precisely where she said she’d be, hands on hips, a general surveying a battlefield made of oranges.

“You’re late,” she announced.

“I’m three minutes early.”

“Exactly. That’s late for me.” She jerked her chin. “Come. We’re shopping.”

“For?”

“Shoes, obviously. You invoked prophecy. We must respect it. Also, your current sneakers are an insult.”

They plunged into the market’s arteries. Vendors pressed wares into their hands, laughter, stories. A woman sold shoes from a mountain of shoeboxes that towered like an unsteady city. Sneakers, sandals, glossy church shoes that promised to squeak in the name of the Lord. Ciska demanded durability and metaphor.

“Too flimsy,” she said, rejecting a pair of white trainers. “You can’t cross anything in these. You’ll slip into your destiny and sprain your ankle.”

“What does crossing require?” Benjamin asked, holding up a boot that looked like it had already survived something.

“Grip,” Ciska said. “Flexibility. A sole that remembers the ground but doesn’t become it.”

“That’s annoyingly poetic.”

“Contagious, apparently,” she said, with a half-smile that softened the bossiness into care.

He tried on pair after pair. Nothing felt right. Either the shoe bit at his heel or it swallowed his toes like a greedy fish. He pictured Badra-Kali’s six hands, the bowl that caught futures, the thread that unspooled time. He pictured bridges. He pictured belonging not as a fixed point but as a practice.

“Close your eyes,” Ciska said suddenly. “Stop frowning. Let your feet tell you.”

“That’s not how bodies—”

“Eyes,” she ordered.

He closed them. The market narrowed to touch and sound. Leather brushed his fingers. Someone argued cheerfully in Ga. A child laughed like a small bell. Beneath all of it, that low river sound again, not outside, not inside, but between. He slid his foot into a shoe. It held him without clutching. He stood. The ground did not feel different, but he felt more himself standing on it.

“These,” he said.

He opened his eyes. They were plain, well-made boots the color of rain-wet earth. The vendor nodded as if she’d been waiting for him to find them. “Good ones,” she said. “Made to last and mend.”

“Perfect,” Ciska declared, handing over crumpled cedis with the flair of a patron in a myth.

They left the market with the boots boxed and the day ripening around them. Ciska’s phone pinged. “Louis wants to meet at the beach. Nathaniel is ‘in the vicinity,’ which is his mysterious way of saying he’s two meters behind us.”

Nathaniel, in fact, materialized beside the plantains as if conjured. “I bring coconut,” he said, lifting a bag. “And curiosity. Also sunscreen.”

They took a tro-tro toward the ocean. The city changed clothes as they traveled—business shirts loosening into football jerseys, pavement giving way to sand. The ocean, when it appeared, felt like a lung filling. They walked to a quieter stretch, where the day performed itself without audience.

Benjamin laced the boots on the sand, a ridiculous act that made him grin. He stood. The world did not tilt. No gates opened in the air. But the boots settled around his feet with a promise: we will go where you go.

“Okay.” Louis’s voice was soft enough to belong to the wind. “Now what?”

“Now,” Benjamin said, tasting the word like something slightly salted, “we see what crossings means.”

He stepped toward the water. The edge of the tide reached for him and retreated, a game older than language. He waited until the foam kissed his toes, then set one foot into the sea fully, boots and all.

“Benji—” Louis warned.

“It’s fine,” Benjamin said, and it was. The leather drank nothing, or if it did, it turned the drink into memory. Cool wrapped his ankle. A hush blew through him that wasn’t fear. He took another step. The boots pressed the sand and released it. The ocean sighed and decided to accompany, not oppose.

He didn’t speak aloud. The question he had lived with since last night braided itself with the sound under everything and went out like a line cast from a careful hand. If I am blessed by death, what am I to do with the living?

The answer came not as a sentence but as attention. The world leaned in. A shadow shifted near the rocks—a shape hunched, half-seen, as if someone sat there staring into time. Benjamin blinked. The figure remained, transparent as a heat mirage, edges wavering. Not frightening. Sad.

He glanced back. Louis watched, breath held. Nathaniel’s eyes were lanterns again, steady. Ciska stood ready to make a joke that would not humiliate the holy.

Benjamin waded closer to the rocks. The figure turned its face toward him. For a heartbeat, it was only light bent oddly. Then it was an old man with a cap in his hands, though he wore no cap. The cap was the absence of the thing he could not put down.

“Hello,” Benjamin said, because beginnings should be polite. “Are you… waiting?”

The old man’s mouth moved, words lapping and slipping. Benjamin let the not-voice pass through him. He did not force understanding. He offered it a place to sit.

“Lost,” the sense resolved, not heard, known. “Lost at the crossing.”

Benjamin nodded. “Me too,” he said. And then, because he had to test the bridge he’d been given, he lifted his hand the way he had toward the stubborn candle. His palm met the air where the old man’s cap would be. He pretended to take it. He pretended to place it on a head that had forgotten the shape of being honored.

“Home is that way,” he said, turning slightly, as if arranging a chair to catch the sun. “You can go. You don’t have to carry what isn’t there anymore.”

The old man’s outline thinned like breath on glass. He did not smile. He did not vanish with drama. He simply lightened and leaned, and the air made room for him the way a crowd shifts to let someone pass. The ocean tugged and gave.

Benjamin exhaled. The low river sound inside him brightened into something like a chord.

He walked back, boots dripping nothing, heart spilling everything. Louis reached for his arm. “You okay?”

“I think,” Benjamin said, feeling the day choose its weight, “I just built my first bridge.”

Nathaniel handed him coconut water. “How was the toll?”

Benjamin drank. Sweetness cut the salt. “A promise,” he said. “That I won’t do it alone.”

Ciska flung an arm over his shoulders, a clumsy wing. “Good,” she said. “Because we’re very annoying company. Twenty chapters’ worth.”

Benjamin looked at the long line where sea met sky. The road didn’t start or end there. It ran through him, through the city, through the people he loved. He wiggled his toes inside the boots and felt the ground answer back.

“Then,” he said, “let’s walk.”

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