Paper Cranes

A Story by Tori

Wishes don't always come true.

If you fold one thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. She didn’t remember where she had heard it, but she remembered clearly the day she counted out exactly one thousand sheets of pretty patterned origami paper and sat in the middle of her small living room floor and began folding.

She remembered how clumsily her fingers hand moved at first, her folds uncertain and each finished product only slightly resembling a crane. But as she kept working, past ten...twenty...thirty...each one became better and better until they were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

Outside, the sun set. The air grew colder and the sky darkened into an inky black, but she was oblivious, sitting on her living room floor and folding one hundred...two hundred...three hundred cranes with no intention of stopping. Her hands grew achy and she grew tired, but she simply would not stop until she had folded one thousand cranes and her wish had come true.

The sun rose, and her energy began draining. Her bed, sitting unattended in the next room, seemed more and more appealing with every passing second. But she was determined, and as she folded the nine-hundredth crane, her wish became stronger and stronger in her mind. Every fold she made was one step closer, every crane she finished, a great stride. And she wanted to continue making those strides. She folded nine hundred and ninety seven... nine hundred and ninety eight... nine hundred and ninety nine...

And halfway through the last crane, she stopped. She looked at it, and looked around at the paper birds that surrounded her, making their homes on the floor, on the armchair next to her, even on her lap. She yawned, blinked her eyes, and made the final folds. And then, she stood up.

One thousand paper cranes surrounded her, but she didn’t feel the sense of magic she was supposed to, that she had imagined she would. She didn’t even feel accomplished. She counted each bird painstakingly, and then did it again, coming to the same total each time. One thousand.

She blamed her apathy on exhaustion. It was the best excuse for everything. So, she laid down in the middle of the floor, surrounded by her birds, her obsession, and she was asleep before she could count the ten laying in a haphazard heap right in front of her.

When she awoke, something didn’t feel right. Though she was rested, though the cranes were still there, her wish still hadn’t come true. Slightly dismayed, she cleared a spot on the couch and watched blankly as her TV flickered to life. Maybe I should just give it time, she thought. All good things come with time.

So she waited. Ten...twenty...thirty days went by, and still her wish was unfulfilled. She waited longer. One hundred...two hundred...three hundred days passed, and nothing happened. So, she waited even longer. Nine hundred and ninety seven... nine hundred and ninety eight... nine hundred and ninety nine days flew by. The cranes still sat in her living room, attached with the string she’d strung them on the very first day she’d created them. But her wish was still just sitting in the air, a heavy unspoken promise that she knew was broken.

When she woke up the next morning, she knew that every sliver of hope she’d foolishly kept was gone. She had waited one thousand days for that wish to come true, one day for every goddamn crane that she’d sat in that goddamn living room and created, one day for every one of those great strides she had made. But the strides hadn’t been forward, she knew that now. They had taken her in one big circle, and now she was back where she started: pathetic and alone, with a big wish and no way of making it come true.

She picked up the string that held the cranes. She walked down the street with its length trailing behind her. She walked and walked and carried those cranes to the beach, where she cast the end of the string into the surf and kicked the cranes into the water, one by one. It took her a long time, but she stayed there until every tiny broken promise rested at the bottom of the sea.

And there she stood on the beach: waiting for something that would never come, hoping to regain the hope that would never return to her, and utterly alone.

She was, and would always be, unfulfilled.