Jordan Rangel Carreon, “THE TRUTH”
Folded closed, the bird is set down.
The paper is thin, foxed by the frigid humidity that breezes through the cracked windows, hardwood floors shot cold by the bitter winter air. Sun rays peek through the fog, cast through glass-paned frames. Light sends prisms through the windowsills. The flickering wick of an extinguished candle sits atop a wooden nightstand, a final streak of smoke blowing from the crimson ash.
Nearly fifty paper cranes sit perched upon the nightstand, dust collecting on their sun-stained paper. The discolored markings are brittle and stale in the room. Floral patterned origami of previously sharply creased wings, now simply soft curves bent down, splay in a crooked line across.
The old owner of the birds–a woman who resided in a house which now sat abandoned in a neighborhood so dimly lit and quiet that the solitude of its residents presented practically as a ghost town–had passed in the attic of her own home, expired and alone. Over weeks, the woman’s body withered under numbing air that settled through from the cracks of the unkept house. Her figure had stiffened and sunk into itself, sickly-pale skin harboring flesh as stiff as the metal door hinges that locked her frail, decomposed corpse in the cramped building’s walls; a body naturally preserved within frosted mold and mildew. Her eyes remained open through her death, her hair splayed frantically on the rotting ground. She died among cobwebs, black widow spiders, and raggedy patchwork clothing that rested on her rigored skin. The woman’s powdered blue lips were parted and cracked dry, and she lay on her back with her arms outstretched. In her left hand sat a small square of Yuzen origami paper, halfway folded to the neat shape of a bird.
It seemed almost more poignant to die amid the company of her collections rather than next to a stranger in a cemetery, but a rotting corpse in the attic of a house was not as praised as a proper burial would have been. The relatives, of which the woman had very little of, and who did not much care for her death, nor for her last testament, were each left a jar of multicolored paper cranes that they received during the reading of the will. The funeral took place in a barren graveyard, only a few grimacing members in attendance, and all who had only showed because the events they were supposed to use as an excuse to skip the tragic occasion got canceled. The infested skin upon the woman’s bones, as they cast her body into the ground, was much too thin for an open casket, though much too ignored to be covered up. The attendees gained a sort of eerie pleasure watching the frail frame caked with foundation as she was finally put to rest. They thought it best to keep her locked in a wooden box holding a bouquet of flowers, rather than sprinkle her ashes into an ocean or over a waterfall, per her request. Though, knowing her family, they would have let the ashes pour from the ern into their backyard, dust the remains off their hands, and spend the rest of the day in bed taking drags of their cigarettes and watching cable on their broken televisions. No reception followed the burial, and after weeks the entire memory of the woman had been placed inside the far back of a storage closet, the cranes she had left her siblings and children sitting next to seasonal holiday decor and a box labeled “sentimentals” in scribbled black sharpie.
Glass jars collected dust, and as the tarnished metal locks rusted shut, the woman’s cranes, and what was left of her voice, permanently locked in a rigid, tight seal. Ubenknonst to anyone, the woman had written messages inside the birds, folding up the lyrical memories and wordless poetry that spiraled in her mind as she so desperately paced the halls of her silent, still home. She had confessions to hand to her family, almost as if she knew that a letter from the living would only have expended sincerity than noted phrases from the quoted deceased. Perhaps, the last pleas that were left were so completely unremarkable that sharing such excerpts would be as useless as placing a body in a casket–taking up extra space when there was never a proper reason to in the beginning. Unopened and sealed, the messages sat, as unremarkable and uncared for as the once desolate cadaver in the icy attic had been; Final words so close out of reach as a casket, six feet under soil.
