The Counting Sky Over Kumasi
by Lorvoker
Sci-Fi
Kwame Mensah, a fifty-eight-year-old satellite-dish installer who pedals around Kumasi with a ladder strapped to his bicycle, aims an elderly customer's dish at the wrong patch of sky and picks up a patient, repeating broadcast that teaches counting in a language of clicks. By morning the space agency in Accra wants the dish and a foreign consortium offers him enough to put his daughter through medical school, so he must choose between selling, handing it all to the government, and answering the signal himself from Mrs. Owusu's rooftop.