The price of bridges

By afternoon, the city had boiled itself into a slow simmer. The air held everything lightly—fish smoke wandering in from the harbor, engines sulking in the street, the thrum of a life that did not ask permission to continue. Benjamin sat on the balcony outside the apartment, the railing warm against his forearms. The boots sat by his feet, already scuffed like they had known him longer than a morning.

Christel stepped out with a bowl of mangoes and the look of someone who had debated a dozen openings and chosen not to rehearse. She handed him a wedge. “Tell me the shape of it,” she said.

He told her. Not every detail, but enough that the story could stand on its own legs—Badra-Kali’s arrival, the stubborn candle, the ocean, the old man near the rocks and the way the world made space when he spoke to it differently. The words felt absurd in the practical sunlight. They felt true anyway.

Christel listened the way a field listens to rain. At the end, she pressed her palm to the railing as if feeling for the city’s pulse. “Our mother,” she said, and the phrase did not fit easily in her mouth. “All these years, I thought our family was at the mercy of stories. Now I see we were written into one.”

“Are you angry?”

“I’m busy,” she said, half-smiling. “Anger can queue. You know I am on a first-name basis with reality. If this is real, we will live it. If it is not, we will still eat dinner.”

“I don’t know the cost yet.”

“You will. Costs introduce themselves.”

They fell quiet, watching a flock of kites worry something invisible in the sky. The balcony door creaked; Louis squeezed through, then Nathaniel, then Ciska who announced, “The mango smells like secrets,” and stole a slice.

“I met someone by the rocks,” Benjamin said, to them this time. “Not someone—something like someone. Lost at the crossing, he said.”

“So there are more,” Nathaniel said softly, not as a question.

“I think so.”

“Then we should learn what we’re doing,” Louis said. “Before we do it wrong and break something we can’t fix.”

Ciska flopped into a plastic chair. “Great. Field trip. Where does one learn bridge-building for the dead? University of Unfinished Business? National Library of Crossings? Your mother’s altar?”

Benjamin glanced at Christel. They did not have an altar. They had a family photo on a shelf and a habit of not naming the gap. The gap had arrived wearing six faces and a necklace of thresholds.

“Let’s start with someone who has seen a lot of doors,” Christel said. “Come.”

They took a tro-tro to Korle Gonno, where a woman named Auntie Mansa ran a seamstress shop that doubled as a community switchboard. If someone needed a job, a loan, a prayer, or simply a place to sit where listening was currency, Mansa found a way. The shop smelled of starch and thread, and the hum of her machine was the exact sound of patience moving forward.

“Auntie,” Christel said, ducking under necklaces of ribbon. “My brother needs advice.”

Mansa examined Benjamin over the top of her glasses. “Advice is expensive,” she said. “You have coin?”

“I have respect,” Benjamin said automatically, because his father had taught him that line when he was eight, and it had never failed with an elder. “And mango.”

She pretended to consider. “Mango will do. What is the matter?”

Benjamin told the shorter version, the one that did not require belief in a goddess but did not lie either. He told her he had met grief that could not stand and offered it a chair. He told her he suspected there were more chairs to set out. He told her he did not know where to put them.

Mansa’s machine went quiet. “There are people who linger,” she said, threading words like needles. “Some for love, some for fear, some because no one has named their leaving properly. Once, this city had more ways to say goodbye. We have fewer now. Fewer doors kept open long enough.”

“How do we open them?” Benjamin asked.

“You already did,” she said. “You saw a person where most would see air. You honored. That is a door.” She reached under the counter and set a silver bell on the table. It was ordinary, the kind of bell people ring to call a shopkeeper from the back. “This belonged to my late husband. He used it to call me from a nap when customers came. After he died, I would hear it sometimes in my dreams and wake up laughing, angry, missing. The day I sold the bell, the dreams stopped. But I never boxed it. I kept it here, where hands can touch. Objects remember. Sound does too.”

She pushed the bell to Benjamin. “If you want to call someone who cannot hear in the old way, ring this. But not like a master summoning a servant. Like a host calling a guest by their favorite name.”

Benjamin touched the bell. It was cool and, improbably, heavy—as if hospitality weighed more than metal. “What do I owe?”

“Bring it back when you are done,” she said. “Also fix my leaking tap if you can. Wisdom comes with chores.”

They laughed. Outside, the afternoon had turned the street a bright, argumentative white. They walked toward the lagoon where the city’s veins met the ocean’s patient mouth. The air smelled half-sweet, half-sour, like a mood changing its mind. A boy in a Barcelona jersey pelted past them chasing a plastic bottle as if it were a ball. Nearby, an old woman sat on a broken chair, her feet bare, her gaze fierce and unfocused both.

Benjamin held the bell. His friends settled like a small country around him—Ciska at his right, Louis close enough to be a thought, Nathaniel with his hands in his pockets, ready to anchor or lift. Christel stood slightly apart, witness and sibling both.

He rang the bell once.

The sound was not loud. It was exact. It landed in the air the way a key lands in a palm. For a heartbeat, the lagoon paused. A wind neither hot nor cold brushed his cheek. The old woman by the broken chair turned toward the sound sharply, mouth opening in a silent “oh.”

Behind her, against the glare, a second outline appeared, smaller, younger, holding its hands out like a person runs toward a cousin at the bus stop. The old woman’s face changed the way a room changes when someone opens a window. Tears gathered with no fuss.

“I see you,” Benjamin said, not to the outline, not to the woman, not to the city, but to the moment itself. “I see who you’re waiting for.”

The outline solidified enough to have a grin. A young man, hair stubborn, eyes bright with mischief. He raised his chin at the old woman like a greeting learned long ago. Her sternness dissolved into a laugh that shook, then steadied.

“You late!” she scolded, and the air carried the sound with surprising kindness.

“Traffic,” the outline answered, as cheeky as any grandson. The word did not scratch their ears. It landed inside their chests and was understood.

Benjamin stepped back. The bridge did not need him centered on it. He felt the cost arrive not like pain but like gravity. It pooled in his calves, reminding him that standing between worlds asks legs to be rivers. He breathed into it. Louis’s fingers brushed his elbow, quiet as a promise.

The young man lifted his hands. The old woman lifted hers. Where they met was nowhere and exactly here. A gull screamed at the wrong time. A tro-tro honked as if to keep the mundane honest. The outline brightened then thinned, and the old woman’s shoulders released a decade all at once.

“Thank you,” she said to no one and everyone.

Benjamin rang the bell again, softer. The sound folded on itself like a napkin after a meal. He felt the cost settle, then trickle away.

“That,” Ciska said, wiping at her eyes and pretending it was sweat, “was… educational.”

Nathaniel’s voice was rough around the edges. “What did it take?”

“Balance,” Benjamin said. “And a little of me.” He looked at the bell. It looked back, unassuming. “The price is not coins. It’s attention, care, time. And probably sleep.”

“Sleep we can police,” Christel said briskly, because that is what people do when the world grows larger—they rearrange the furniture. “Tonight we keep watch. You build bridges with a curfew.”

Louis’s smile found him and stayed. “We’ll learn the tolls. We’ll pay together.”

Benjamin felt the road join his bones more firmly. Badra-Kali had promised crossings and cost and company. He laced the promise into his breath. The lagoon shifted toward evening. Somewhere, a bell rang in some ordinary shop for an ordinary reason. The sound was still a key.

“Twenty chapters,” Ciska said, recovering her swagger. “We’re three in, and you already owe a tap repair.”

“Wisdom with chores,” Benjamin said, and, despite the weight in his legs, found that he could still laugh.

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