Fiction by Benjamin Cyril Arthur

The music is everywhere today. It leaks through the wooden louvers, bounces off the concrete walls, settles into my pores like nkuto. Daddy Lumba’s voice, smooth as pito, sweet as sugarcane, croons about love and longing.

The boys call it burger highlife. Music from Ghanaians who went away to Germany, to America, to elsewhere, and brought back something new-but-old, foreign-but-familiar. The guitars sound different now, electric, urgent, wrapped in synthesizers that make Auntie Ama shake her head and mutter about “these modern times.”

But her hips move anyway. Even as she stirs the soup, her body remembers rhythm. I sit on the kitchen counter where I have sat every Sunday for thirty-two years. Before that, I sat in another kitchen in another compound, held by other hands. Maame Serwaa, the mother’s mother, she shaped me from river clay when she was fifteen years old. Rolled me between her palms, coiled me into being, fired me in a ground kiln until I became hard and useful and permanent.

Or so she thought. Nothing is permanent, I have learned. Everything cracks eventually.

***

It is Sunday, and Sunday means fufu.

The kitchen is small and hot and alive. Three women move through it like a choreographed dance they have performed a thousand times. Auntie Ama, the mother’s sister, sharp-tongued and soft-hearted, tends to the palm-nut soup bubbling on the coal pot. The smell of smoked fish and spiced meat rises like prayer.

The Mother, whose name is Akosua but everyone calls her Maa, pounds fufu in the mortar outside. I can hear the thud-thud-thud of the pestle, the rhythm older than burger highlife, older than independence, older than roads and electricity and all the things people call progress.

Efua, the daughter, sixteen and restless, washes plates in a blue basin. She hums along to Daddy Lumba, knows every word, moves her shoulders the way young girls do when they are trying to become women but haven’t quite figured out how.

“Stop moving and wash properly,” Auntie Ama says without looking.

“I am washing properly ma,” Efua replies, but she stills her hips. A little.
George Darko’s “Akɔba” comes on next. The guitar intro sparkles like afternoon sun on water. Efua forgets herself again, sways.

Auntie Ama laughs. “This highlife will be the death of concentration.”

But she’s smiling. Her foot taps against the concrete floor. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Keeping time.

The music has been playing for three hours now. Kwame, the son, twenty-one, university student, family pride, brought the cassette player home last month. German-made, bought second-hand in Kantamanto market, precious as gold. Since then, the music never stops. Daddy Lumba, George Darko, sometimes Lucky Dube when Kwame wants to feel revolutionary.

The music seeps into everything. Into the walls. Into the food. Into me.

I am clay, but I am not empty. I hold sounds the way I hold soup. And these melodies, these burger highlife songs about love and loss and leaving and returning, they live in my curved walls now. I cannot unhear them.

***

Kwame enters the kitchen. I know his footsteps, quick, light, and purposeful. He is tall like his father but gentle like his mother. He wears wire-rimmed glasses that make him look serious and intelligent, which he is. He studies engineering at University of Ghana. He will build bridges, his father says. He will connect places.

“The fufu is ready,” Auntie Ama announces.

Kwame crosses the kitchen in three strides. His hands reach for me. I know this part. I have done this part ten thousand times.

He lifts me, careful, respectful, the way Maame Serwaa taught his mother, the way his mother taught him, and carries me to the sink. He rinses me with clean water, inspects me for cracks (none yet, none yet),

“You’re older than me, asanka,” he murmurs. It’s a habit he’s had since childhood, talking to me like I might answer. “What have you seen, eh? What stories do you hold?”

If I could speak, I would say: More than you know. More than anyone knows. I have held births and deaths, celebrations and sorrows, secrets and lies. I have held two generations of this family’s hunger and joy.

But I am clay. I am silent.

He carries me outside where his father waits under the neem tree. Papa Yaw, fifty-three, mechanic, muscled arms stained with engine oil that never quite washes out. He sits in his wooden chair like a king on a throne, waiting for his Sunday meal.

Kwame places me on the small table beside his father, the fufu and soup inside me hot and Tantalizing.

The music follows us outside. Daddy Lumba sings about a woman who left, about waiting, about hope that hurts.

***

I have been watching Kwame for twenty-one years. Watched him grow from baby to boy to young man. Watched him learn to crawl, to walk, to run. Watched him cry when his pet cat died. Watched him study by candlelight during the power cuts. Watched him receive his university acceptance letter and saw his mother weep with pride.

But lately, I have watched him change.

It started six months ago when Kofi began visiting.

Kofi: twenty-two, also a university student, studying literature, always carrying books with strange titles. Giovanni’s Room. Maurice. The City and the Pillar. Books with foreign names that mean nothing to me but seem to mean everything to Kwame.

At first, they studied together. But then the studying became longer. The laughter became different, softer, more private, curling into itself like smoke. The way they looked at each other became something else. Something I recognized but had no name for.

Or perhaps I had a name for it, but the name was dangerous. The name was unspoken. The name was a thing that could crack foundations, break families, shatter clay.

I watched Kwame’s shoulders relax when Kofi entered a room. Watched his smile become genuine instead of dutiful. Watched him become more himself and less the son, less the brother, less the future engineer who will build bridges. Just Kwame. Just a boy becoming a man in a way no one expected.

The music knew before I did. Daddy Lumba sang about forbidden love, about secrets, about wanting what you cannot have. And Kwame would play those songs on repeat, volume low, late at night when the house slept.

“Me dɔ wo,” Daddy Lumba sang. I love you.

And Kwame would mouth the words, staring at nothing, thinking of someone.
Today, Kofi came to visit again.

He arrived just as the fufu was being pounded, carrying a textbook and an excuse about studying for finals. But finals were two weeks away, and the textbook looked unread.

“Good afternoon, Auntie,” he greeted Ama, respectful, proper.

“Kofi! You are always welcome. Have you eaten?”

“Not yet, Auntie.”

“Then you will eat with us. There is plenty.”

Mama called from outside: “Kwame! Come! your friend is here!”

And Kwame appeared, too quickly, his face bright in a way it hasn’t been for family in months.

They disappeared into Kwame’s room. To study, they said.

George Darko played on. His guitar wept and celebrated simultaneously. How does music do that? Hold two truths at once?

***

Papa Yaw eats from me now. Fufu and palm-nut soup, his favourite. He tears off pieces with his right hand, dips them in soup, swallows with satisfaction. The food settles into his belly, warm, heavy, purposeful.

“The soup is good today,” he calls to the kitchen.

“When is it not good?” Auntie Ama calls back, pleased.

Papa Yaw chuckles. The neem tree shades him from the afternoon sun. A lizard does push-ups on the compound wall. Somewhere, a church bell rings, second service ending.

Inside, through the open window, I hear them. Kwame and Kofi. Their voices, low, private.

I should not hear this. But I am on the table closest to Kwame’s window, and sound travels.

“Your mother is calling you,” Kofi says.

“Let her call. She knows where I am.” Kwame’s voice is different when he speaks to Kofi. Lighter. Freer.

“You’re going to get us in trouble.”

“There is no trouble. We’re just studying.”

A pause. Long enough that the music fills it. Daddy Lumba is singing again “Theresa Abebrese,” a song about a woman who is everything, a song about love that cannot be contained.

“Are we?” Kofi asks. “Just studying?”

Another pause. Longer.

I am clay. I should not hold this moment. But I do. I do.

Papa Yaw finishes eating. He washes his hands in the bowl of water Efua brings, wipes them on the towel, sighs with contentment.

“Tell your mother the food was blessed,” he says to Efua.

“Yes, Papa.”

He stands, stretches, walks toward the outdoor bathroom. His footsteps fade.

Inside Kwame’s room, something shifts. The air changes. The music swells. Daddy Lumba’s voice rises, “Me dɔ wo, me dɔ wo, me dɔ wo”, and I feel it before I see it.

Movement through the window. I should look away. I should not witness this. But I am clay, and clay does not have eyelids. Clay sees everything and holds it all. Kwame leans forward. Kofi meets him halfway. Their lips touch. It is gentle. It is terrifying. It is beautiful. It is forbidden. It is real.

The kiss lasts six seconds. Maybe twenty. Quick as lightning, soft as rain. Then they pull apart, breathing hard.

Kofi nods. They sit in silence smiling, hands touching. Daddy Lumba keeps singing. The music doesn’t stop for revolutions, small or large.

I want to shout.

I want to scream.

I want to warn them: Stop. Be careful. This world will not hold you gently. This family will not understand. This country will not protect you. Stop before it’s too late.

But I am clay. I am silent.

And something happens inside me that has never happened before.

A crack.

Small. Hairline. Internal.

It starts at my base, where I am thickest, where I am strongest, where Maame Serwaa’s hands coiled me tightest, and it travels upward, slow as sunrise, inevitable as age.

I feel it like pain, though clay should not feel pain. I feel it like breaking, though I am not yet broken. The crack moves through me, and I understand: I am holding something too heavy. A secret too large. A truth too dangerous. And I am old, thirty-two years old, which is ancient for an asanka, and I am tired, and I cannot hold everything anymore.

The crack stops just below my rim. Invisible from outside. But I feel it. I know it’s there.

I am breaking. Not from use. Not from heat or cold or impact. I am breaking from witnessing.

Kwame emerges from his room ten minutes later. His face is composed, neutral, the dutiful son returned. He collects me from the table, brings me to the kitchen to be washed.

“Did Papa finish?” Mama asks.

“Yes. He said the food was delicious.”

Mama smiles. “Go and call your friend to eat. There is plenty.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Kwame washes me carefully. He does not notice the crack. Why would he? It is inside, where no one looks.

He places me on the table to dry beside the window. The music still plays. George Darko’s Moni Palava.

Through the window, I watch Kofi and Kwame eat fufu together at the kitchen table. They sit across from each other, proper distance maintained, nothing unusual to see. Efua chatters about school.

Auntie Ama adds more soup to their bowls. Mama hums along to the music.

A family scene. Normal. Sunday.

But I see Kofi’s foot brush against Kwame’s under the table. I see Kwame’s small smile. I see the secret passing between them like a shared meal, like a burden distributed, like a joy too dangerous to speak aloud.

And I feel the crack inside me widen. Just a little. Just enough.

I am asanka. I have held three generations of this family’s sustenance. I have held plantain and yam and cassava and rice. I have held soup and stew, palm nut, groundnut and the others. I have held celebrations, outdooring ceremonies and funerals and Christmas dinners and Sunday lunches.

I have held births: the pepper soup for new mothers, the eto for naming ceremonies.

I have held deaths: the food for mourners, the meals for the bereaved.

I have held everything a family is.

But now I hold something else. Something new. Something that will change everything if it escapes.

I hold the moment two boys became men by kissing each other. I hold the crack that formed inside me from the weight of their secret.

I hold the knowledge that some truths are too heavy for clay, too dangerous for families, too fragile for 1990 Ghana where survival means conformity and conformity means silence.

The music plays on. Burger highlife from boys who went away and came back different. Music about transformation, about distance, about wanting to return home even when home doesn’t have room for who you’ve become.

But where do you come back to when home cannot hold all of you?

Where do secrets go when they are too large for the vessels that contain them?

Night falls. The compound grows quiet. The music finally stops, cassette finished, player turned off, silence settling like dust.

I sit on the drying rack, clean and useful, ready for next Sunday’s fufu.

The crack inside me is still there. Invisible. Internal. Growing slowly, slowly, the way all breaks begin, not with violence, but with pressure applied over time, with weight accumulating, with truths that have nowhere else to go.

I am thirty-two years old. Maame Serwaa made me to last fifty, maybe sixty if I was lucky and careful. I have eighteen years left, maybe thirty. Maybe more.

But the crack knows what I know: I will not last that long. Not anymore. Not carrying this.

Some burdens break the vessel.

Some truths crack the foundation.

Some loves are too heavy for the world to hold.

I am asanka. I am clay and memory. I am family history fired into form.

And I am breaking from the inside out, one secret at a time, one kiss at a time, one moment of truth at a time.

Daddy Lumba’s voice echoes in my pores: “Me dɔ wo, me dɔ wo, me dɔ wo.”

I love you, I love you, I love you.

And the crack widens.

And I hold on.

And I break.

***

The music is everywhere today, but it makes no sense.

It pounds through walls, rattles windows, shakes the ground like thunder with no rain. The boys, no, not boys anymore, men now, call it hiplife. Rap. Words spat fast and angry over beats that have no melody, no sweetness, no room for longing. Tupac and Biggie screaming about money and competition and being the king.

Where is the guitar? Where is the crooning? Where is Daddy Lumba’s voice smooth as pito, teaching us how to hold love and loss in the same breath?

This music knows only how to shout. It has forgotten how to ache.

I sit in darkness now. Deep in the cupboard, furthest corner, where light does not reach and hands do not wander. Thirty-nine years old. Ancient. Obsolete. My crack has widened over the years, branching like roots, spreading through my belly. I can feel it when the bass from the speakers vibrates through the kitchen, into the cupboard, into my clay bones.

It is Sunday, and Sunday means wedding preparations. Kwame is getting married.

Not with Kofi. Kofi left. Six years ago, 2004, won a scholarship to America to study, wrote letters for two years, then the letters stopped, then nothing. Just silence that grew and grew until it filled every corner of this house, until Mama stopped setting his place at the table, until Papa stopped saying his name.

But Kwame remained, except that version of Kwame is gone too.

This Kwame is in his late twenties. This Kwame is getting married to Afua and I hate her. I know this is not my place. To hate. To judge. But I have been in this cupboard for seven years, since the day she came to this house carrying her abominations, and I have earned the right to hate.

The blender arrived on a Tuesday. She with it, a box with foreign writing. “I bought this for Mama!” she announced, her voice too loud, too bright, too certain of her welcome.

Auntie Ama, now, bent and slow but still sharp-tongued, looked up from her cooking. “What is it?”

“A blender! Very powerful. It can blend anything, pepper, tomatoes, garden eggs, everything! No more grinding by hand. I saw it and I thought of you.”

She pulled it out of the box. Plastic and metal. Electric cord coiled like a snake. Glass jar that caught the light wrong, too perfect, too smooth, too modern.

“Ah,” Auntie Ama said,

But Afua did not hear the tone. She was already plugging it in, already adding pepper and tomatoes, already pressing the button that made it WHIRRRRRR, violent and loud, grinding everything to liquid in thirty seconds.

“You see? So easy! No more using that old grinding stone. Your back will thank me, Mama.”

Auntie Ama smiled. But her eyes did not smile.

That was the day the grinding stone went quiet. The ancient stone, older than me, older than this house, passed down from Maame Serwaa’s mother’s mother. Silent now. Replaced.

That was the day I was replaced. The Auntie Ama whom I had served for years tossed me aside and embraced the thing that was better than me in every way.

I watch from my darkness. The kitchen is chaos today. Women everywhere, cooking, laughing, shouting instructions, preparing for tomorrow’s wedding. Jollof rice and fried rice in massive pots.

Fried chicken mountains. Salad in containers that never need washing because they are disposable, like everything now.

Afua orchestrates from the center, pointing, directing, tasting, approving, never stopping. She has brought her own bowls. Ceramic. White. Modern. Bought from a store in Accra. Not made by anyone’s hands. Manufactured. Identical. Soulless.

Papa Yaw, now, shrunken and quiet, eats from these ceramic bowls now. His Sunday fufu comes in white bowls that match nothing, mean nothing, hold nothing but food.

When did he stop eating from me? I cannot remember exactly. It was gradual. Until I was moved from the table to the counter. From useful to decoration to burden to forgotten.

***

Kwame arrives in the afternoon. I hear his car first, engine purring, expensive, nothing like Papa Yaw’s old Toyota that coughed and sputtered. Then his footsteps. Still quick. Still light. But not purposeful anymore. Just movement. Just going through motions.

“Good afternoon, Mama. Good afternoon, Auntie.” His voice is the same. Respectful. Proper.

“Kwame! Ah, the groom! How are you feeling? Nervous?” Afua the bride calls out, teasing.

“No, not nervous. Everything is ready.”

“Your suit is ready? Your shoes? Your groomsmen have their outfits?”

“Yes, yes, everything is ready.”

But his voice is flat. Flat as day-old Fanta. Flat as harmattan sky.

I know that flatness. I have been flat in darkness for seven years.

Through the crack in the cupboard door, yes, even the cupboard door has a crack now, everything cracks eventually, I see him. Still handsome. Still tall. But something is missing.

This Kwame does not smile with his eyes anymore. Only with his mouth. And only when people are watching.

“Come and taste the jollof,” Afua the bride insists. “Tell me if it needs more seasoning.”

He tastes it from a spoon she offers. Chews. Swallows. “It’s perfect.”

“You always say everything is perfect.”

“Because you always make everything perfect.”

The words are right. The tone is right. But I am clay that has held love before, real love, dangerous love, forbidden love and I know: this is not the love I know.

This is performance.

This is survival disguised as joy.

I have seen this before.

***

Night comes. The kitchen empties. Kwame remains. I hear him moving around. Restless.

Opening the fridge. Closing it. Opening it again. Not eating. Just moving. Just filling space in ways I don’t understand because I am clay and have never needed to fill anything except what is poured into me.

Then, a sound I have not heard in years: the cupboard door opens.

Light floods in, painful after so much darkness. My surface, if clay has vision, struggles to adjust.

Kwame’s hand reaches past newer pots, shinier bowls, plastic containers, reaching, reaching, until his fingers touch me.

“Oh,” he says softly. “You’re still here.”

He lifts me out. Gentle. Careful. The way many hands have lifted me.

He carries me to the sink. Washes away years of dust and cobwebs. The water runs brown, then gray, then clear. Cold at first, then warm. He dries me with a clean cloth, his fingers moving over my surface the way fingers do when they’re looking for something—though I don’t know what.

His finger traces my rim, finds the crack.

“You’re broken,” he whispers.
I am cracked. This is true. But broken? I don’t know. I am still whole enough to hold. Still here. Still clay. The crack has not spread, though perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. I am not a prophet. I am asanka.

He stands there, holding me, staring at nothing. The kitchen is quiet. The music has stopped.

For the first time all day, there is silence, and in silence I can feel the vibrations of his heartbeat through his hands, faster than I remember from before.

“Do you remember?” he asks me, and I know he knows clay cannot answer, but he asks anyway because some questions need speaking even without answers. “Do you remember when things were different?”

I remember textures. I remember the way fufu used to be pounded, Mama Akosua’s rhythm, steady and sure. But different? I don’t know what different means beyond the accumulation of time in my pores.

“I thought…” He stops. Starts again. “I thought if I waited long enough, if I was good enough, if I built a life that looked right, it would start to feel right too.”

He sets me on the counter. Leans against the sink. Removes his glasses, wipes his face with the back of his hand, a gesture I’ve seen Mama Akosua make when the smoke from the stove gets in her eyes, when the onions make her cry, when something hurts in ways that don’t have names.

“Tomorrow I marry Afua. A woman… a good woman who…” He doesn’t finish.

His voice does something that reminds me of the way I sounded when the crack first appeared

Some things, I am learning, are too dangerous to say aloud, even in empty kitchens, even to clay that cannot repeat what it hears.

The blender sits on the counter. Shiny. New. Electric. He looks at it, then back at me, and I wonder if he’s comparing us the way humans compare things, though I don’t know what conclusion he draws.

“I used to think love was like burger highlife,” he says quietly. “Something that could be both familiar and foreign at the same time.”

I know burger highlife. I remember the sound of it. The way it held two truths in one rhythm. But I don’t know what this is. I know use and purpose. I know the weight of what’s placed inside me and the way it changes me slightly, wearing me down grain by grain until I’m not quite what I was, but still asanka.

He picks me up again. Holds me the way you hold something you’re trying to remember or trying to forget—I can’t tell which.

“I loved him,” he whispers to me.

His hands shake. I can feel it

He sets me back in the cupboard. Back in the darkness. Back with the spiders.

Before he closes the door, he runs his finger along my crack one more time. Gently. The way you touch something you’re trying to understand. Then the door closes. Darkness returns.

I sit with what I know: Kwame came. Kwame held me. Kwame spoke. Kwame left.

I sit with what I don’t know: What he will do tomorrow. What he wants. What anyone wants. Why any of it happens the way it happens.

The wedding is tomorrow. The music will play, I will hear it even from the cupboard. The food will be served, I will smell it. The families will gather. The pastor will speak. Something will happen that humans call marriage, though I don’t know what it means beyond two names becoming one name, beyond two families becoming one family, beyond change that is supposed to feel like arrival but might feel like leaving.

And Kwame will smile. I know this because I have seen him smile before, in this kitchen, in this house, and the smiles are different every time. Some smiles taste like joy. Some taste like duty.

Some taste like something I don’t have words for because I am clay and clay doesn’t taste anything, only holds what is given to it.

Tomorrow someone will ask him, “Do you take this woman?”

He will answer.

But what the answer means, what any answer means when spoken into rooms full of witnesses and expectations and God and family and fear and love and all the things that make humans say yes when they mean maybe, when they mean I don’t know, when they mean I am trying…

This is not for me to know.

I am only asanka.

The wedding will happen. Or it won’t. Kwame will say yes. Or he will say no. The marriage will hold.

Or it will crack. Life will continue in this kitchen, in this house, in these bodies that move through time the way I move through users

And I will be here in the cupboard, in the darkness, with my crack and my memories and my not-knowing.

Still asanka.

Still waiting to see what I’ll be asked to hold next.

To read other amazing literary works from our latest issue, order To Be Continued here

Bio
Benjamin Cyril Arthur is the 2025 Global Voices scholar currently at the University of East Anglia studying creative writing, MA. He won the emerging voices scholarship for the Geneva Writers Group Conference 2025 and was the winner of the 2020 Samira Bawumia literary prize award in Ghana. He was a participant in the Canex Creative Writing Workshop 2024. His short stories have appeared in lolwe, Brittle Paper, Flame Tree Press, Tampered Press, Lunaris Review, lounloun, Ama Atta Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing, and many others.