The smoke from Fahad's fire rises at the same angle it always did, even though the street beneath it was scraped away four dry seasons ago. The federal government sent bulldozers. The smoke ignored them.

He sets up at six. The oil drum is dented in the same left side, where Alhaji Sule reversed into it in 2015. Fahad ran after the car with a skewer in his hand, shouting words he later apologised for. He thinks of this sometimes, when his hands move through the motions of threading meat onto wire. The apology. Whether Alhaji Sule heard it.

Where the chemist used to be, there is now a concrete fence with a mobile money advertisement painted on it in red. Where Mama Chisom sold akara from her blue plastic basin, rubble slopes into a drainage channel. Fahad's fire sits on ground that is technically, on the government's maps, the median of a road that does not yet exist. He knows this and sets up anyway.

The boy who buys liver every Tuesday comes at half past seven. He has not spoken in some months, only places the right coins on the drum's flat top and nods the same nod, precise as a signature. His father used to stand behind him, one hand on the boy's shoulder, negotiating extra pepper with the theatrical outrage of a man who loved pepper and knew Fahad knew it. Fahad wraps the liver in newspaper. He uses the same sheet he has been folding and refolding for longer than he can account for. The ink has not smudged.

An old woman comes close to eight. She lived three doors down, in the yellow house with the broken security light that flickered every harmattan. Fahad hands her the pepper sauce in the small sachet she always requested. Her money is warm. She walks north without looking back. He watches the space she moved through.

A man in a suit orders the full stick, beef only, no suya spice. He pays with a note Fahad holds briefly against the kerosene light. He does not say anything about the note. The man in the suit does not say anything either. Both of them look, for a moment, at the advertisement on the concrete fence. Then the man takes his suya and goes.

By nine the coals are settling. Fahad unscrews his water bottle, drinks, screws it back. A piece of paper blows across the mud where the road will one day be and catches on the edge of the oil drum, trembling. He peels it off. It is a receipt from a pharmacy, dated 2019, for a blood pressure medication, name of patient illegible. He folds it carefully along a crease it already had. Puts it in his breast pocket.

The smoke rises. Above where the street used to be, it pauses, just slightly, before continuing up.