Paper Birds

The distant rumble of explosions sounded like a giant rolling over in its sleep, shaking the walls of the tiny, crumbling apartment. Amir sat cross-legged on the floor, his small hands working methodically as he folded a sheet of paper. The sharp creases made soft crinkling sounds that, in his mind, drowned out the chaos outside. His mother’s voice drifted from the next room, soft but weary. She was praying again.

This crane was his ninety-seventh. Amir smoothed down the wings with a fingertip and held it up to the light filtering through the cracked window. A perfect silhouette. He placed it on the windowsill beside its folded brethren, a flock of paper birds in various hues of salvaged pages, magazine scraps, and old receipts. They stood vigil against the war outside, their fragile forms defiant against the world’s madness.

“Hey,” came a voice from behind him.

Amir jumped, nearly knocking over the flock. He turned to see a girl standing in the doorway. Her dark hair was tangled, and her clothes were dusty, but her eyes glimmered with curiosity and mischief. She looked about his age, though there was something older in her gaze, as if she had seen too much too soon.

“Who are you?” he asked, clutching the latest crane to his chest.

“Zara,” she said, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation. “I saw your cranes from the street. They’re nice.”

Amir hesitated. He wasn’t used to strangers anymore. “Thank you.”

“You’re good at it,” Zara said, her eyes scanning the makeshift flock. “Why do you make them?”

Amir shrugged, unsure how to explain. “It… helps. When the bombs come, I don’t think about them. I think about this.” He held up the crane. “And they’re beautiful.”

Zara nodded, as if this made perfect sense. Then she said, “You know about the legend, right?”

“Legend?”

She grinned, her teeth white against the soot smudged on her face. “If you fold a thousand cranes, you get a wish.”

Amir frowned. “That’s not true.”

“It is!” she insisted. “But you can’t do it alone. You need someone to help you. My grandmother told me that when I was little.”

For a moment, Amir said nothing. He wanted to dismiss her words as nonsense, but there was something compelling in her tone, an urgency that made him wonder. He glanced at the cranes. Ninety-seven was a long way from a thousand.

“What would you wish for?” he asked.

Zara’s grin faded. “Peace,” she said simply. “No more bombs. No more soldiers. Just… quiet.”

The word hung between them like an unspoken prayer.

— -

The next day, Zara returned with a bundle of newspapers tucked under her arm. “For the cranes,” she said, dropping them on the floor.

Amir blinked at the stack, then at her. “You’re serious about this?”

“Of course,” she said, already tearing a page into squares. “We’re going to make a thousand, and then everything will change.”

Amir didn’t argue. He didn’t tell her how impossible it seemed, how folding paper cranes could never stop a war. Instead, he sat beside her, and they worked in silence. She folded quickly but sloppily, and he had to fix her mistakes. Still, there was something calming about having her there, her presence filling the hollow quiet of the apartment.

By nightfall, they had added twenty new cranes to the flock.

— -

Days turned into weeks. Zara became a constant in Amir’s life, slipping through the streets like a shadow to reach his apartment. Together, they folded through air raids and power outages, through the screams of distant sirens and the eerie quiet that followed. Sometimes, Zara would tell stories about her grandmother, about how she used to sing lullabies and bake bread that filled the house with the smell of warmth and safety. Amir listened, and sometimes he told her about his father, who had left to fight in the war and never returned.

One evening, as they worked by candlelight, Zara said, “Do you think the cranes will work?”

Amir paused, a half-folded bird in his hands. “I don’t know. But I hope they will.”

“Me too,” she whispered.

— -

The first tragedy struck in early winter. A mortar shell landed two streets over, and the blast shattered Amir’s window. When the dust settled, he found half of the cranes scattered across the floor, trampled underfoot in the chaos. Some had been torn by flying glass, their delicate wings shredded.

Amir stared at the ruined birds, his heart sinking. Zara arrived a few hours later, her face pale but determined. Without a word, she sat beside him and began folding new cranes from the debris. He wanted to cry, but her calm resolve steadied him. They would start again.

— -

The second tragedy was quieter but cut deeper. Zara stopped coming. Days passed, then a week, and Amir’s apartment felt emptier than ever. He ventured out one morning, clutching a handful of cranes in his coat pocket, and found her sitting on the steps of an abandoned building. Her eyes were red, and her hands were trembling.

“My mother,” she said when he approached. “She’s gone.”

Amir didn’t know what to say. Instead, he sat beside her and held out one of the cranes. She took it, her fingers brushing his, and for a moment, the world seemed less broken.

— -

The cranes became their lifeline, their shared rebellion against despair. They worked faster now, folding whenever they could, as if racing against an invisible clock. The flock grew once more, spilling across the windowsill and the floor. But the war grew closer, too. The sounds of gunfire were no longer distant, and food became harder to find. Amir’s mother fell ill, her prayers turning to fevered murmurs in the night.

One by one, the cranes began to disappear. Some were stolen by the wind through the broken window; others were crushed beneath their feet as they scrambled for shelter. It felt like the world was conspiring against them, as if it knew their fragile hope was too dangerous to survive.

— -

By spring, they had only one crane left.

It was Zara’s favorite, folded from a page of her grandmother’s recipe book. The paper was soft from handling, the edges worn, but its shape was perfect. It sat on the windowsill, alone now, a solitary sentinel against the gathering storm.

Amir and Zara sat on the floor, staring at it. Neither of them spoke. The thousand-crane dream had slipped through their fingers like sand, and the weight of that failure pressed heavy on their shoulders.

“What now?” Amir whispered.

Zara didn’t answer at first. She reached out and touched the crane, her fingers trembling. Then she said, “We keep going.”

Amir frowned. “But we’re out of paper.”

She looked at him, her eyes fierce. “Then we find more. We’ll use anything. We can’t stop now.”

He wanted to argue, to tell her it was useless, but something in her gaze silenced him. Instead, he nodded.

— -

That night, a new explosion shook the city. This one was closer than ever, and the apartment walls groaned under the force. Amir grabbed the crane and pulled Zara into the corner, shielding her as the building trembled. When the dust settled, they found the windowsill empty.

The crane was gone.

Amir sank to his knees, clutching at the empty air. Zara stood frozen, her face pale in the moonlight. For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Then, Zara stepped to the window. “Look,” she said softly.

Amir followed her gaze. Outside, in the rubble-strewn street, the crane fluttered in the wind. It had landed on a broken lamppost, its wings catching the pale light like a beacon.

Without thinking, Amir climbed out of the window and scrambled down the side of the building. Zara called after him, but he didn’t stop. His feet hit the ground, and he raced toward the crane, dodging debris and the sharp edges of broken glass.

When he reached the lamppost, he plucked the crane from its perch. Its wings were crumpled, but it was intact. He held it close, breathing a sigh of relief.

Zara appeared beside him, her chest heaving. “You’re crazy,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice.

Amir looked down at the crane, then back at her. “We still have one,” he said. “It’s not over.”

She nodded, her smile fading into something softer. Together, they stood in the ruined street, the crane between them, a fragile promise in a world gone mad.