It’s summer in the Global North and winter in the Global South. Reason enough for Literatur.Review to bring summer and winter together in August and publish previously untranslated or unpublished stories from the North and South of our world.

Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Colorado Review, Chestnut Review, Orion Magazine, North American Review, Protean Magazine, GEIST, Berkeley Poetry Review, Mantis, Minyan Magazine, Wildscape, Decolonial Passage, and elsewhere.
He is a nominee for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the BREW Poetry Award, and the 2026 Caine Prize. He is the first-place winner of the African Writers Award (Poetry), a winner of Poetry Archive Now! Wordview 2025, a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow alum and was featured in the Obsidian Foundation Showcase with The Poetry Society.

Gariba was told the burial would happen before the day was finished. He did not ask when the day had begun, or whether it had ever properly started at all. The words came to him already decided elsewhere, carried across mouths that did not expect an answer.

In the courtyard, the old women washed the pots without speaking. Wood scraped against metal in a steady motion that made time feel measured rather than lived. The sun lowered without urgency, and nothing in the yard changed with it except the length of shadows. It was the dry season. The ground had hardened into something close to stone. A grave was not made quickly. It had to be broken open.

Gariba sat outside the doorway on a stool carved from a solid block of marula wood, his palms resting flat against his thighs. His hands were broad, the knuckles permanently swollen from years of cutting back thick acacia briars to clear paths for his cattle. Today, his fingers felt empty of purpose. Behind him, inside the main hut, the heavy reed screen muffled a rising argument among the women preparing the body.

“It is entirely against the custom,” Nyamila said. “A shroud is what the ground accepts. If she is buried in leather, she will not rest easily.”

“She had no interest in walking with the ancestors,” Lapopo said, shaking her head. “She asked for the marigold dress and the boots.”

At the time, Gariba had simply nodded. His mind drifted back to the night the fever took hold of Mingba. Mingba had reached for him in the dark, her fingers tightening around his sleeve.

“Gariba,” she whispered. Her breath carried the bitter scent of wormwood tea. “The brown shoes. The ones with brass eyelets. Pull the laces tight. Do not leave my feet loose in the ground.”

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The sun was down. Shadows spread across the enclosure. Nyamila pushed past the reed screen and stepped into the yard. She wiped her hands on her apron and stopped in front of Gariba.

“We have finished dressing her,” she said. “A woman buried with her ankles bound so tightly will not rest easily. She will be left pacing the boundary walls of this village.”

“Then let her stay near the walls,” Gariba said softly. “If she is close, I will know where she is.”

Nyamila spat on the ground and returned to the fire, where funeral porridge thickened over wood flames.

Lapopo came out last, carrying the basin of gray water. Her hands trembled slightly as she set it down.

“She looks peaceful,” she said. “But the boots were too tight. She hated them when she was alive. She said they made her feel locked in.”

Gariba stood. The ache in his knees answered him as he moved. He stepped into the hut.

The air inside was heavy with paraffin and crushed basil leaves. Mingba lay on a grass mat, her head raised slightly on folded cloth. Lapopo had dressed her in the marigold fabric. The bright pattern looked out of place against the stillness of the room.

At the foot of the mat, the boots waited.

Gariba lowered himself to the ground. His hand rested on one toe. The leather held the cold of the earth. He stayed there for a long moment. He remembered the dry months following the miscarriage two years prior. The rains had failed completely that season. The pastures were brown and the cattle too weak to pull the plows. When the labor had begun prematurely, Mingba had kept her silence. She had simply walked out of the compound, away from the small cluster of mud brick homes, down to the massive wild fig tree at the edge of the grazing lands.

Gariba had found her there at sunset. The heat of the day was still radiating from the ground, but Mingba sat on the ground, her arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. She had her stained apron pulled up. She held it against her body as if she were protecting something highly fragile.

He had approached her slowly, carrying a small tin bowl of sour milk and ground maize. “Mingba,” he had said, kneeling beside the great protruding roots. “The sun is gone. The wind is changing. We must go back to the house.”

She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on a small, empty patch of gray sand where the tree’s shadow met the open path. “She is sitting right there,” Mingba had whispered. Her voice had been flat, entirely devoid of the familiar warmth he had known since their youth.

Gariba looked at the spot. There was nothing there but a handful of fallen, unharvested leaves and the dry droppings of goats that had passed through earlier in the afternoon. “There is nothing there, Mingba. Come home. Let us prepare the evening fire.”

“She is sitting right by the secondary root,” Mingba insisted, her finger rising to point at the bare ground. “The old women think that because she never drew breath, she does not have an identity. They think she is just blood. But she is sitting there, Gariba. She is looking at the path that goes to the river. She cannot go because her feet are too tender for the dry grass.”

He had tried to lift her, but her body had been remarkably rooted to the sand. For three hours, he sat with her under the canopy, watching the stars appear through the gaps in the leaves. He had always believed the dead stayed where they were placed, until names disappeared into the soil. But, watching his wife’s unblinking gaze, he began to look at the empty sand as well. She had refused to eat, and she had refused to return to the homestead until the pre-dawn chill made her limbs shake.

A month later, seeing that she still refused to walk the common paths in her bare feet, Gariba had taken the silver he received from selling his two best bullocks and walked forty miles to the rail-crossing settlement. It was a dusty crossroads where the miners from the northern pits bought their equipment. The shops there were fronted with heavy iron bars to keep the thieves out, and the merchandise was dark and practical.

He entered the largest supply store, his boots clicking on the concrete floor. Behind the counter, secured by a heavy wire mesh screen, sat a row of sturdy work boots. They were built for the rough gravel of the shafts and the rough shale of the railway lines. The leather was thick, smelling strongly of industrial oil and animal fat used for waterproofing.

“The small size,” Gariba had told the clerk, pointing through the wire. “The ones with the reinforced brass eyelets.”

The clerk hauled them down and dropped them onto the counter with a heavy thud. “These are for the railway workers,” the man said, looking at Gariba’s traditional blanket. “They are too heavy for the fields. Your woman will tire before she finishes a single row of maize.”

“She is not wearing them for the fields,” Gariba had replied, counting out the silver pieces onto the counter.

He had carried them home in a burlap sack, his heart filled with a rare, desperate optimism. He believed the boots might help her walk away from the wild fig tree. He imagined her wearing them, her ankles held firm by the thick leather, walking the market trail with ease, leaving behind the shadow of the dead child. He gave them to her on a Tuesday morning and placed them on the dirt floor of their room.

Mingba had looked at them for a long time. She did not try them on. She did not even loosen the factory knots. She pushed them beneath the bed. They stayed there for twenty months, gathering fine white dust that drifted through the doorboards. Then the fever took her mind.

+++

Before the fever took her entirely, there had been the journey to the clinic, a final attempt to bridge the distance between her mind and the village. Gariba had paid a transport driver to let them ride on the iron bed of a commercial lorry, forty miles through the bouncing ruts of the dirt road. Mingba had sat perfectly rigid, her back against the cab, her eyes fixed on the massive columns of gray grit raised by the heavy transport trucks moving toward the coal mines.

The clinic was a flat-roofed concrete structure that smelled of methylated spirits and damp wool. The medical officer was a young man from the southern provinces, eyes bloodshot, stethoscope loose at his neck. He examined Mingba’s eyes, tapped her knees with a rubber hammer, and listened to her chest.

“There is no infection,” the doctor said. “Nothing the body can explain.

He opened a cardboard box and took out two strips of white tablets. “Give her these every morning. They will calm the brain.”

Gariba had taken the pills, but as they stood in the small office, he looked at her hands on her lap. Mingba took the medication without protest when they returned home, but she never looked at the small white disks. She swallowed them with water from the clay pot, then immediately turned her face toward the small window. Her fingers tracking the patterns of the thatch as if she were counting the days until her departure. The final confirmation had come on the third night of the great heat, when the fever had taken full possession of her tongue. The room had been dark, save for the small grease-lamp that cast a flickering yellow glow over her sweating face. Her skin was so hot to the touch that it felt like the floor of an oven after the coals had been raked into the yard.

“She has grown, Gariba,” Mingba had murmured suddenly, her eyes wide and fixed on the center pole of the roof. The wandering talk of the previous days had vanished, replaced by an unsettling clarity.

“Who has grown, Mingba?” he asked, wiping her neck with a damp cloth. “Lie still. The night is almost over.”

“The little one,” she said, her fingers tightening around his wrist with a strength that made his bones ache. “She is not the small, helpless thing we put into the dirt under the livestock enclosure. The old women were wrong. She has been walking out by the boundary lines. She has legs now. She can run through the scrub.”

“Mingba—”

“She is taller than the goats now, Gariba,” his wife interrupted, her voice rising slightly, as though she were speaking to something only she could see. “She stands as high as the structural posts of the granary. But she does not know where the stones are loose. She does not know where the path gives way, where a foot can twist and fall. She does not know that the acacia thorns can strip the skin from a child’s shin if she runs in the dark without care.”

She paused, breathing unevenly, then continued.

“She called to me when the cattle were coming back this afternoon. She said, ‘Mama, the sun has baked the ground into iron, and my feet are too tender for it. Bring me the heavy things from the crossing, the ones that hold me down when the ground turns sharp.’”

Her grip on him tightened. She pulled him closer until her dry lips were almost at his ear, her words no longer addressing him so much as pressing into him.

“The boots under the bed,” she whispered. “You must tell Lapopo to put them on me when the breathing stops. And you must be the one to lace them, Gariba. Pull the leather until it bites above the heel, until it holds without mercy. If a shoe comes loose in the tall grass, you lose your way. And if you lose your way, the deep bush does not return what it takes.”

Her breath broke for a moment, then steadied again.

“Promise me,” she said. “Double knots. No ribbons from the store.”

He sat there in the dark while the grease-lamp sputtered and died. He said nothing.

+++

The burial party assembled at dawn. Six men from the neighboring homesteads took position at the hemp ropes, testing their grip, adjusting their footing on the loose edges of the pit. They worked without speech. Sweat darkened their backs and shoulders as they leaned into the task, lowering the pine box in slow, careful stages into the narrow trench cut deep into the hard red clay. When the first clods of loosened soil broke free from the shovels above and struck the lid below, the sound rose out of the pit as a dull, contained thud, quickly swallowed by the surrounding ground. 

Gariba stepped forward. He crouched at the edge and let a handful of dry earth slip through his fingers. The gravel scattered across the pine lid, skittering into the seams where the wood had not been tightly joined. For a moment, the box seemed to hesitate under the weight of it, before the younger men resumed their work and the silence gave way again to movement.

They took over the filling of the grave. The sound was almost perfunctory now, a pattern of impact and withdrawal that dulled the presence of those watching.

Nyamila stood just behind Gariba, close enough that her voice did not fully belong to the air between them. The wind moving down from the ridges carried fragments of her words away before they could settle.

“Those cotton laces will decay within three winters, Gariba,” she said softly, her gaze fixed on the rising mound of soil. “The damp will take the string first, then the leather will soften and break apart. In the end, nothing holds. Her feet will come loose, no matter what was promised in her last hours.”

Gariba did not look at her. His attention stayed on the steady beat of the shovels, on the way the earth kept returning in equal measure to what had been taken from it.

“Three rainy seasons are a long time,” he said at last. “A child can travel far in three years if someone is walking with her.”

The old woman did not argue further. She simply turned her back, whispering a traditional phrase to ask the local deities to overlook the obstinacy of the family, and began the long walk back toward the village clearing.

“May the spirits of this land turn their eyes away from stubborn hearts.”

+++

By midnight, all activity in the village had stopped. The final groups of mourners had returned to their own homesteads, their hunger satisfied by the shared funeral beef and the roasted maize. Gariba did not go inside his sleeping quarters. The scent of the crushed wild basil leaves had completely vanished from the room, leaving only the neutral, stale odor of the recently swept dirt floor and the cold wood ash in the hearth. He took his place on the mud threshold instead, tracking the progress of the crescent moon as it climbed over the eastern ridge. The moon provided pale illumination shadows from the scattered acacia trees out across the open plain. A mile from the houses, precisely where the communal grazing pasture terminated and the thick uncultivated bush began, the massive wild fig tree rose against the horizon. Its immense root system erupted from the ground, twisting and winding along the surface of the soil before plunging back down into the earth.

Gariba stood up. He pulled his heavy wool blanket securely around his upper body to shield himself from the sudden midnight drop in temperature. He walked down the incline of the hill. He chose not to carry a kerosene lantern or a torch; he had walked this specific trail for decades and could identify every turn in the darkness. When he arrived at the junction where the main trail divided toward the riverbank, the night air grew completely still. The atmosphere under the trees felt heavier. It held the distinct smell of decomposing organic matter and the sweet scent of overripe figs rotting on the ground.

He halted ten paces from the massive trunk.

The circular patch of dirt beneath the branches was entirely sheltered from the wind by the thick overhead canopy of leaves. Under the direct moonlight, the ground appeared completely undisturbed, presenting an even sheet of fine, gray sand.

Gariba knelt down on both knees. In the soft silt where the shadow of the branches met the pale reach of the moonlit path, the ground held two separate stories pressed into it. The surface was still fresh enough to read.

One set of marks was small. Bare feet. The impressions were uneven, urgent, the toes spread wider than they should have been. The heel marks barely touched the earth at all. Most of the weight had shifted forward, giving the impression of running without full balance, circling back on itself in tight loops around the base of the tree.

Right beside it, almost touching at points, another line cut through the same soil. These marks were clearer. The edges were sharp, the depth consistent, each step placed with the same measured pressure. The pattern did not waver or return on itself. It moved forward with certainty. They were the marks of industrial rubber soles, the kind built to hold weight steady on rough ground. There was no hesitation in them, no uneven shift. Whoever wore them had walked like the earth could be trusted to remain solid beneath each step. The ankles that made those impressions had not twisted or faltered. They had been held firm inside thick leather, shaped to keep movement contained and controlled. The two paths ran side by side for a short distance, the restless circles of bare feet pressed against the straight, steady line of boots. Then, just before the edge of the tree’s reach, they tightened toward each other, almost overlapping, before continuing outward into the grass where the ground became uncertain and harder to read. There, at the exact line where the tree’s shade ended, the smaller marks shifted. From that point, the distinction between them began to blur. The sand loosened its memory. The edges softened. The impressions sank back into themselves. He stayed kneeling until there was nothing left to follow.

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More from Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri on Literatur Review: 
A Taste of Home, A Language of Belonging
Award-winning Ghanaian writer Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri on grief, belonging, Black imagination, literary life in Ghana, and why writing began with unfinished drawings

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