DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Aoi tied her shoes for the third time.
“Hurry up, Aoi!” Ren called from the sidewalk outside the school gates.
The tree Aoi sat under rustled what leaves were left on its spider-leg branches. The wind plucked a single leaf free and hurtled it toward Ren and Niko, who were crossing the street. Aoi shivered, thinking of graveyards and ghosts, then pushed her glasses up on her nose and followed after her friends.
“Wait!” Aoi called as Ren and Niko rounded the corner with the blue fence, the path below spattered with cherries.
They didn’t wait, so she followed their cherry footprints, which faded in the direction of the field they always crossed on the way home every day. But not tomorrow.
Aoi skidded to a stop as the world opened to grass she could get lost in, a sky that might carry her away, and her two best friends wavering on the horizon as if they were made of paper, two brush strokes barely there, ready to be crumpled and discarded.
“No,” Aoi said, but the wind stole her word and tossed it into the grass, which chittered with glee. She stuck her tongue out at it.
“What’s taking so long?” It was Ren, her soft face smiling below a curtain of bangs.
“Sorry,” Aoi said, “I just . . .”
Ren tossed a pebble at Niko who leaped as it hit the ground with a crack and bounded into the grass. Slender white shapes rose from where the pebble landed. Two cranes. Black tail feathers, neck with a red scalp that matched the color of the cherried path.
Aoi looked back the way she had come, to find the other bird. The third one. Finding nothing but the blue fence far in the distance, she said, “There are only two.”
Ren retied Aoi’s braid that had come loose. “Like us.”
Aoi beamed. “Really?”
Ren shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You guess?”
“Why are you being so weird? My parents will be mad if I don’t get home soon. We should go.”
“Why?”
Ren looked at her as Niko approached. “I just told you.”
“But remember when we played out in this field until it got dark and–”
Niko slung her bag off her shoulder. “And we all got grounded for a week. Even the weekend.”
“Yeah,” Ren said.
“But,” Aoi said.
“But what?” Niko said.
“It’s the end.”
Ren and Niko looked at each other and laughed. They both stood and brushed off their knees. The two cranes stood on the path, preening their wings.
“We have to find the third one,” Aoi said. “It’s us. Ren said so.”
Niko made a face at Ren. “Huh?”
Ren blushed, looking down. Her hair whittled her face into a sliver. If she didn’t have bangs, it would have been gone completely.
“You guys are weird,” Niko said. She faced the cranes and mocked their preening, croaking a song that sounded nothing like theirs.
The two cranes ignored her, exploring the edge of the path with their beaks.
“We’re the weird ones?” Ren said and rolled her eyes. She kicked Niko’s bag to get her attention.
Aoi stayed where she was, looking for the third crane that must be there, stalking the shallows she knew were there but couldn’t see. Far behind, like her. Left behind, like her.
Ren joined Niko in her charade, and they giggled when the cranes finally noticed them, spreading their wings wide and taking flight toward the sun where no silly girls were to be found.
Aoi closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face. Her glasses slipped down her nose, but she let them sit there, ready to slip off. All she had to do was scrunch her face and the parts behind her ears would rise over them and the weight would do the rest.
But she didn’t. Instead, she looked through her lenses which were as far as they could be from her eyes without falling off, noting the way they warped and bulged the world, making everything in the middle big and everything along the outside squashed. They did the same to Ren and Niko who had continued along the path toward home. Soon that path would split, and they would go their separate ways.
“And you’ll go away for the summer like you always do,” Aoi said. “Both of you. But it’s different now. You’ll be there and I’ll be here, and then you’ll be somewhere else after.”
Aoi sat down and untied her shoes. She undid her braid and shook it free in the breeze. She let her glasses fall off her face, but the frame caught a lock of hair and swung into the grass.
She searched the blur of color for her glasses. It was green and brown for a time. Then hands joined the search, and her pale fingers reminded her of the two cranes. She suddenly didn’t care about her glasses anymore and balled her hands until they didn’t look like cranes at all. Handfulls of grass were what they found.
“Aoi,” Ren and Niko said together.
Aoi looked up at her friends who didn’t look like cranes at all. Niko taller with hair past her shoulder. Ren shorter with hair above her shoulders.
Then they knelt down to her level. She felt her braid retied. She felt her glasses returned, which allowed her to see their faces, the sun behind them, dabbing the tops of their heads with red, just like the cranes.
Aoi tied her shoes for the fourth time.
“We can wait a little longer,” Ren said.
“We can,” Niko said. “Remember when we played tag out there one time and Ren fell into the stream and pretended she was drownin g?”
“You guys were crying so hard,” Ren said.
“So mean,” Aoi and Niko said in unison.
“Hey, look,” Ren said.
The two cranes picked there way through the reeds ahead before taking flight.
“It’s us,” Niko said to Ren.
Aoi smiled. “It is.”
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