Ayana.

The one thing Ayana always wears is a pair of teardrop earrings with a red stone, set in gold. Her grandmother Haoua gave them to her on an ordinary day, when she was twelve; there was no funeral behind them — her grandmother is still alive in Dosso and still asks her on the phone what she can see. In that one object she wears both of them at once: her grandmother, and the sky. Every night before sleep she takes them off and sets them in a ceramic bowl by the bed; every morning she puts them back on before heading out. When something's weighing on her, her hand goes down to touch them.

By day she has a practical job; by night she's a self-taught observer of the Sahel sky, building her own telescopes and mapping one of the darkest skies she's ever seen. There's a faint smudge, right at the edge of what her homemade lenses can reach, that she's spent years trying to pin down without ever quite managing, and that she comes back to some nights. It's an everyday hoodie, for pre-dawn work or the couch; the whole of Ayana's story is in her biography.