One Blue Crane -- fiction by Anya Wang

Melissa lifted a pad of blue Post-Its out of her pencil case. She hunched over her desk, using her arm to shield her handiwork as she eased a Post-It off of the pad and began folding. She had folded so many cranes by now that she could do it with one hand. Side to side, crease down the middle. Other side to other side, a plus sign emerging from the creases.      

She noticed the girl sitting next to her staring as she folded. She met her eyes. She smiled at her. She was a new girl–Zoey, their teacher had introduced her as–short black hair hovering like commas over her shoulders and square-rimmed glasses stretched like a bridge over her nose, wide-eyed as she took in her new history teacher rambling about class expectations and the girl sitting next to her ignoring him, folding origami instead. 

Zoey stared at Melissa a little longer. She stared at her hair, the color of summer wheat fields, cascading down her face in coils. She stared at the little paper heads poking out of her sweater pocket, a flock of paper cranes stuffed in the cave of cotton.

The lights switched back on. Mr. McCornan had turned them off for his first-day presentation. As the class blinked, adjusting to the light, Melissa rose from her desk, and a blue paper crane, its head dark from the sticky stuff that held Post-Its together, revealed itself from the cradle of her arms. 

Melissa smiled. She looked at Zoey, then put her finger on her chin, as if pondering something. Then she picked up the crane and placed it on Zoey’s desk.

Zoey blinked. “What’s this for?”

“Keep it,” Melissa said, dimples appearing, hugging her lips. “It matches the color of your sweater.”

Zoey looked down. She was, indeed, wearing a pale blue sweater.

***  

Zoey sat in the backseat, her backpack rattling as her mother drove over a speed bump. The paper crane fluttered a bit, like a newborn bird testing its wings, but managed to stay put in her palm.

She had been thinking about it all day, fingers curled around it in her pocket as if to make sure it was still there. Zoey had never liked it when other people looked at her, especially at her old school. She had hung her head in the hallways, using her hair as a shield as she speed-walked to class, trying to ignore the way the bullies pulled the ends of their eyes apart into slits, laughing, as she walked past. At least no one had done that to her, not yet, in this new school. But she had still hung her head, wishing her hair could swallow her Asian face away in the sea of white ones as Mr. McCornan stared at her name in the attendance list.

“Zoey O-e-i?” he had asked, pointing the tip of his pencil at his attendance sheet, sounding out each letter. Zoey nodded meekly. 

“Huh,” Mr. McCornan had said. Then his face split into a chuckle. “I didn’t know that such a combination of letters could turn into a last name.”

So she had fidgeted when Melissa looked at her, head angling down, preparing to let her hair cover her face like a curtain. Instead Melissa had smiled at her. Really smiled at her, a smile where her eyes, hazel-green, seemed to be smiling too.

“Zoey,” her mother suddenly called from the front seat. “How was school today? First day–was it okay?”

Zoey considered. She stared at the pale blue crane. The pale blue crane that matched the color of your sweater.

“It was good,” Zoey said simply. She smiled. She really meant it.

***

Zoey trotted down the hallway, trailing her mother as they weaved through the hospital, sticking to the side as doctors in clicking high-heels and rolling beds with squeaking wheels rushed by them. They reached a door and quickly slipped inside. Zachary Oei, Pediatric Cancer, its vanilla placard read.

A nurse inside smiled at them, picking up her clipboard as Zoey’s mother greeted her, their voices quickly turning to a low hum, quiet yet urgent. Zoey brushed past them and sauntered to her brother’s side. He looked so small there, his nine-year old body encased, like an art piece on display, in the white background of the hospital blankets, tubes curling from his arms to the monitors looming over him.

Zoey punched his shoulder. Her customary greeting, even after the diagnosis, even after the hospitalization.

“Hey, sis,” Zachary said, smiling up at her.

“Zoey, don’t punch him,” their mother quipped.

“Mrs. Oei,” the nurse was saying, “I apologize, but I left the test reports in the other room. If you don’t mind, they’re just in the doctor’s office, right across the hall…”

“Of course, Nurse Harding,” their mother replied. She turned, piercing them with a look that clearly said behave, before turning and closing the door softly behind them.

Zoey and Zachary looked up at each other. They smiled. They were alone.

“So,” Zachary spoke up, grinning, “how was your first day?”

Zoey looked back at him. She cupped his face in her hands. He had lost so much weight now that his teeth, flashing as he grinned, looked too big for his face. His old tufts of thick black hair had been swallowed by the chemotherapy, and only pale, wilting wisps remained on his small head.

“It was–alright,” Zoey replied. “Look,” she said, suddenly thinking of something that he might like. She pulled out the blue crane from her pocket, smoothing out its wings. She held it out to him.

Zachary picked it up gingerly. He raised it to his eyes. He began turning it in his hands, exploring every detail as if it were a present he had just unwrapped from the Christmas tree. Its pale blue wings, which reminded him of the sky. Its head, sticky like the adhesives coated on Post-Its.

“Do you like it?” Zoey asked. She smiled. “Someone gave it to me today at school. A–friend, I guess.”

***

Zoey and his mother having already left and his nurse yet to return, Zachary stared at the origami crane in his hands. He set it on his lap and pinched its wings. Then he began flapping them, letting them crinkle as he raised them up and down.

He knew it was dumb to get so caught up on a piece of folded paper, but from the moment he was old enough to watch cartoons on the TV, his life goal had been to fly. Once, after seeing Superman soar through the sky, leaping from ceiling to ceiling as if the city were simply his personal gymnastics course, Zachary had cut up an old tablecloth, tied in around his neck, and leapt through the living room, jumping like a ambitious frog from the sofa to the coffee table and all the way to the rocking armchair by the bookshelf.

But now, here he was, his body planted in a hospital bed like a blade of grass buried in the dirt. But now, here he was, tumors erupting from his wings, feathers drifting down like autumn leaves drowning towards the earth.

Click.

Zachary looked up. It was Nurse Harding–she had come back, and she was smiling at him from the doorway.

“Zachary, how are you feeling?” she asked, striding to his side. She put her hand on the edge of his bed and leaned over him. “I heard your sister started her first day at a new school.”

“Yeah,” Zachary said. “And look! Her new friend at school gave her this.” Zachary held up the crane to Nurse Harding, beaming.

Humans typically do not present themselves, bare, to the others around them. Some feelings, however, are too strong. They surge through one’s heart, rearranging the muscles in one’s face, forcing the individual to display themselves, naked, to the world before them.

That’s what Zachary thought was happening. The moment she set her eyes on the crane, Nurse Harding’s entire face drooped. Her lips quivered, her eyes bulged, fighting to keep in the tears forming at the base of her eyelids.

“Nurse Harding?” Zachary asked tentatively. “Are you–crying?”

Nurse Harding set the clipboard in her hands on Zachary’s bed, attempting to ease her breathing, to stop the tidal wave crashing into her heart. She failed.

Zachary shuddered. He had never seen an adult cry in front of him, never seen Nurse Harding depart from her cheery, warm smile, a brave face for the dozens of kids in her ward.

“Would you…like to hold it?” he asked Nurse Harding, holding out the crane to her again.

Nurse Harding hesitated for a moment. Then she picked it up gingerly.

She raised it on her palm, perching it before her eyes. The pale blue of its wings…they were the same color as her husband’s eyes. Her late husband.

She ended up taking that crane home that night, letting it flutter on the dashboard as she drove back home. And just because it felt right, Zachary let her.

***

She had locked the door to the master bedroom for nearly three years now. Once, she had even vowed that she’d throw the key away, drop it down her trash can, cast it into the dumpster, to prevent the cranes locked inside from ever fluttering into her heart again. Yet she had always kept it. Not just kept it, but shined it, polished it, displayed it, sleek and shiny, on her nightstand, the one in the guestroom that was now her bedroom, reaching out a finger to touch it every night before she turned off the light and closed her eyes to sleep.

Some things were too painful to look at. So painful that one could do nothing but rent out a pickup truck and haul them all away. The mahogany bed had gone first. Then the chest of drawers, with the curving grains that he had traced with the tip of his finger at the department store, whispering, in awe, that they undulated like a river. Then the framed photo of their wedding day, the moment where the groom had kissed the bride. Then the lamp, and its soft golden glow, the one they had shared to read, a book cradled between them and their eyes racing to see who could reach the end of the page faster, giggling. Anything. Everything. Everything had gone, until the room was stripped bare, the hardwood floor gazing up at the blank empty walls in confusion.

Everything, except for one thing. Everything, except for that one thing, that she had held over the trash can, driven to the dumpster, hovered over the shredder, yet failed, every time, to let go. 

When the doctor had told him, stammering, that he had only two months left, the first thing James Harding had done was buy a bulk pack–one-thousand sheets–of origami paper off of Amazon. Then he had folded. Folded on his deathbed. Folded, knowing that with each completed crane, he had one less day to see Melissa, to see Natasha, to see the way they shared the same hair, the bushels of summer wheat coiling down their shoulders.

“There’s an old legend,” he had whispered once into that hair, holding Melissa close. “If Daddy can fold one-thousand paper cranes, the world will grant Daddy one wish.”

Melissa had shirked away from him, twisting from his grasp. “But what are you going to wish for?”

In the end, he had only folded 689 cranes. Natasha had scooped those cranes into plastic bags. She had carried those bags into the now empty room. She had placed them in the center of the room, piling them one top of the other until one inevitably lost balance and fell over, casting its cranes like a spilled barrel of paint over the bare floor.

She couldn’t bring herself to pick them up, to place the birds, stuff them, into that claustrophobic bag again. So she had pinched the bottom edges of the bags. She had yanked upward, flipping the bags upside down. She had spilled them, listening as the sound of their crinkling wings wormed into her heart, watching as they spread, like a bubbling pool of water, and drench the wooden floor.

She had collected the empty plastic bags. She had taken a step back, inching away from the pool of cranes until she was past the doorway, key in hand.

Then she had locked the cranes away, paralyzing their wings to the hard, bare floor for the next day, the next week, the next month, and before she knew it, the next three years.

***

Melissa awoke, as she often did, in the middle of the night. Her mother didn’t know this, but when she couldn’t sleep, she’d tiptoe out the door, slink down the hallway, and sit in front of the door to the master bedroom, her back flush to its paneled white frame. She’d silently pray that one day, her mother would unlock the door and let her see those cranes again. Let her hold a piece of him again, let her tell him how sorry she was.

She was only eight. She was only eight when she watched her father wither, his skin shriveling to a pale shade of dusty yellow, his eyes bulging out of his skull as the cancer, like a ravaged dog, scraped his flesh off his bones. She was only eight when her mother tried to explain to her: pancreatic cancer, Stage IV pancreatic cancer, terminal pancreatic cancer. She was only eight when she was dressed in a tight black dress, sitting in the front row of the pew, her mother’s body convulsing with sobs beside her, her father prostrate in a coffin in front of her.

Yet she had never cried for him. Never shed a single tear for her late father. Sometimes she thought she simply wasn’t worthy of crying. She still remembered, with such haunting clarity, how she had treated her father in those very last days. How she had stared at him, his cheeks sunken into his mouth, his hand so thin she could trace its bones like twigs to a bird’s nest, as if he were a scary-looking stranger, a sallow zombie disintegrating in the hospital bed before her. How she had flinched from him, crept away from him, steeled when he asked her for a hug, thinking him no less disgusting than a puddle of yellow-green vomit bubbling on the floor.

So now, when she was older, she had insomnia. So now, she used that insomnia to tip-toe to the master bedroom, to recollect before the white-paneled door. And that night, the night where her mother had brought back that pale blue crane, was no different.

But when she reached the end of the hallway that night, she didn’t find the familiar white panels standing before her. Instead, the door was swung open. The key was dangling from the doorknob.

Melissa fought down a gasp. She froze in place. She squinted, peering into the dark, shadowy room. In it, a form emerged: a hazy outline of someone sitting cross-legged beside the pool of cranes. 

And it was her mother.

Melissa willed herself to be silent–her mother couldn’t, or hadn’t, seen her yet. Melissa silently watched. She watched as her mother pulled out a silver needle, a sewing box strewn open beside her. She watched as her mother gently scooped up a crane from the floor and coaxed a long white string through its belly. She watched as her mother picked up another, threaded another, a garland of cranes emerging from her needle.

Then she watched as her mother climbed atop a chair. She watched as she pressed a Command hook into the ceiling and strung the garland over the hook.

The cranes, once imprisoned to the floor, were now free to flutter in the air.

Melissa felt herself dashing down the hallway and back to her room. She rummaged under her bed, behind her dresser, inside the pockets of the old dresses she used to wear for church. Out tumbled cranes. Cranes of all sizes and colors, made of everything from used dinner napkins to scrap pieces of math homework.

Because while she had never cried, she had always folded. While her face hardened to stone, while her eyes dimmed, showing no emotion, while her mother had once, sobbing alone at the dinner table one night, had told her that she had “taken this so well,” she had always been folding. She had folded on the bus, during class, at the lunch table, with anything she could find, any unwanted scraps, any bits of paper, just–anything. Anything at all, for she had made completing those missing 311 cranes her only justification to continue being. 

She scooped the cranes into her arms, and carried them to the open door. To her mother, who jolted upright at the sight of her, her face plastered in shock.

“Mom,” she croaked. “Mom–can we hang up these cranes too?”

And so it was. Mother and daughter, up late on both a school night and a shift night, cross-legged at the rims of a gaping lake. Threading paper cranes with their needles, easing strings through their bodies, anchoring them to the ceiling, standing back, marveling at how their wings fluttered, letting them go.

Sometime through their crane-threading session, a streak of moonlight tickled the wing of a certain pale blue crane. It caught Melissa’s eye. She blinked. She peered closer.

Its head was dark, sticky like the adhesives on Post-its; its wings were crinkled, as if someone had played with it, giggling as they flapped its wings up and down.

---

Anya Wang is a high school junior from New Jersey. Her work is recognized by the New York Times and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She also edits for the Devil’s Quill, her school literary magazine, and contributes to the Devil’s Advocate, her school newspaper. When not writing, you can find her folding origami cranes or doodling in her sketchbook.