The Black Crane

Paper cranes decorated the blue sky of your bedroom, flying around in arrays of colours, and patterns, and sizes and designs. You always told me that if you made one-thousand paper cranes, that a crane would visit you in your sleep and grant you one wish. Looking by the state of your room, it seems like you had your wish granted.

Above the floor, splattered with toppled over bags of cranes, you dangled from a frayed rope, a huge grin forever etched onto your face. The wrists at your sides still dripped crimson onto the birds below you, drowning them in a literal bloodbath.

I never expected you to go through with it.

I remembered then the first time you told me that you wanted to kill yourself. You were thirteen, and I was eleven, and although I was more aware of things than you were, I was still the most naive out of the two of us. I told you that you would change your mind one day.

Apparently, you never did.

I would have called the cops to take away your body if I didn't truly believe you got your wish. You had told me that you would only ever off yourself if the Black Crane came to you and gave you the courage to. If the crane came to you after you folded thousands of paper birds, maybe one would come to me as well.

I had to try.

That's how you ended up in the back of my truck under a tarp, then in my garage, and then the basement I used as a room. No one ever came downstairs, so I knew I could keep you here until the crane would eventually come and grant me my wish out of pity.

I layed you on my bed and started to work. It took me about an hour to figure out how to make the perfect crane. Then I relentlessly began to fold crane after crane, all different kinds of colours, and patterns, and sizes, and designs. I ended up having to go to the local Dollar Store to get even more paper.

Ever few hours I would stop to count. The first day I made forty-six, the next day I doubled it, and the one after that I made over one-hundred. When the weekend hit, your mother finally noticed that you were gone and came to my house to see if he was there. I forged a note and said that you ran away. When my grief crept through and I began to sob, they believed me even more.

It took roughly a week to get the first thousand cranes done. When I finally slept after a week of all nighters, my body curled up against your reeking corpse, the first white crane came to see me, They told me that what I wanted was impossible and flew away before I could ask for a different wish.

Over the next few months I would make another thousand cranes every few weeks, ask the new cranes for my wish to come true. They all told me the same thing- that what I wanted was impossible. I didn't get why it was impossible. All I wanted was to have you back in my life.

It was a year after your death when my mother found you in my room, decayed, with the noose still around your throat and your smile still etched onto your face. No one believed me when I told them it was your doing, that it was because of what you did that I kept you, trying to get you back. No one believed me.

When they locked me away, I was a few cranes away from my last thousand. My room mate in the psyche ward sneaked me paper when I traded them my pills for it. What need would I have for anti-psychotics when I had you back?

The night I made my last thousand, the Black Crane came to me and asked me what my wish was. As much as I wanted to ask the same thing I had asked all of the other birds, I finally decided to change my mind, "I want to have the strength that you had, the courage to do what you did."

That's how I ended up ripping my sheets, tying a noose the way you did, sneaking into the main room where there was a ceiling fan I could use and hung myself before any of the night staff noticed.

That's how I got you back. I had to join you in order to get you back in my life- afterlife?- wherever it is that we are now. Now that we're both dead, we can be together, forever. At least now I know that I'll be able to have the real you, and not a shell of you, to keep me warm at night.