Afia handed the bowl of dried smoke fish to the customer, and then the lights went out, the third time this week.
          It wasn’t completely dark, of course. The night was clear and there was a sliver of moon, and some of the owners ran their own generators, so the market had only dissolved into a sort of gray twilight, with pockets here and there of bright light and black shadow. But the radios had mostly died, and the sudden outage had briefly stifled conversation on the street, so that for a number of moments Afia heard little except the surf on the shore behind her, the sea one hundred yards away but invisible now, its weedy tang somehow stronger than the smoke from the grill or Kosi’s deep fryer in the stall next door.
          The darkness was an inconvenience, but Afia kept cooking and the customers kept ordering—here’s a crowd of young people leaving the disco—and within an hour the lights returned. A few of the early fishermen arrived to sell their catch, but their stalls seemed unusually empty of both people and fish. A lull in street life incurred a brief wave of fatigue in her, but she rallied when the last of the clubs closed and the kids swarmed the street, looking for kebabs, plantains, and more beer. Two of the disco boys got into a fight in front of her stall, but it was nothing serious, and the vendors applauded and yelled and sprayed water on them until their friends dragged them away.
          Another lull. The kids had gone home. The vendors leaned on their elbows and craned their heads and gossiped. The end of her row should have been hectic with fishermen lugging out their ice-buckets of fish, but there was almost no one there, and the men who were seemed more interested in huddling together and whispering than getting their catch ready for sale. Afia drank a Coke and tried to stay awake. She was too old for this, she should let her daughters do more.
          The lights went out again. Now, with the crowds gone and some of the stalls shuttered, it was dark, it was quiet. The sound of the surf pounded even more strongly as dawn approached, and another sound, a overlapping series of watery thumps and susurrations, as of many people walking over wet sand. Curious, she stepped out of her stall to watch the blackness where she knew the sea began. There should have been lights on fishing vessels, and docks and buoys, and she did see some of those things, in the far distance, almost as far and unearthly as Venus, rising above. But around her, and around the neighbors who had joined her to watch, there was no light, and no noise except that of the army of walking things that have emerged from the sea and are even now looming out of the blackness, blotting out Venus and the rest of the predawn stars.
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