When people didn’t want to collect debts themselves, when the debtor was stubborn, dangerous, or already half-mad, they sent the boy.
“Go to Ato the butcher, tell him he owes 200”
They’d say. The boy never argued. He just nodded and walked. And somehow… everyone paid. Ato the butcher swore he didn’t have the money. He shouted at the boy, waved a knife, cursed his mother. The boy didn’t cry. He didn’t even flinch. He just stood there, eyes calm, head tilted slightly like he was listening to something behind Ato. Then Ato’s face drained of color.
“You look like my brother,”
Ato whispered. His brother had died ten years earlier. Hit by a speeding trotro. Buried behind the old church. Ato paid. Same thing with Madam Adjoa, who hadn’t paid her rent in months. When the boy stood at her doorway, she screamed and dropped her bowl.
“That’s my son,”
She said, shaking.
“But my son died.”
She paid. Word spread quietly, the way dangerous things always do in the ghetto. No one said it loud. But people noticed: the boy always looked exactly like someone the debtor had buried. A brother. A daughter. A childhood friend. A lover. Never the same face. Always familiar.
One night, a man refused. Yaw the mechanic laughed when the boy came.
“You people think you can scare me with this rubbish? I don’t owe anyone.”
He said, lighting a cigarette. The boy looked at him longer than usual.
“Okay”
The boy said softly. The next morning, Yaw was found dead in his room. Peaceful. No wounds. No struggle. His eyes were open. On his chest lay a folded paper. Inside it was a list. Names. Amounts. All crossed out. At the bottom, one name wasn’t crossed out. Yaw Mensah.
After that, nobody refused again. People began to whisper that the boy wasn’t collecting money. He was collecting closure. And one day, when everyone in the ghetto had paid what they owed, to people living and dead, the boy stopped appearing. Some say that’s when the accidents started. Others say the dead simply came to collect for themselves.
