Small Miracles

"So, what's the problem?" he asked.

The head nurse gave him a helpless look. Sighing, she handed him a clipboard and tapped lightly on the name. "The patient in 303. She's been…" the head nurse worked her mouth, searching for words. "Extremely unresponsive."

He looked over the information, though it told an empty story despite the full diagnosis. Postpartum depression, a miscarried child out of wedlock. All so dry, clinical. Her name: Kasukabe, Eri. Sixteen years old, born October 25th. He read through notes by other nurses, comments on fits of prolonged lethargy and sharp bursts of anger. Concerns over self-harm. He glanced up over the clipboard's lip at the head nurse. "You want me to try?"

"You have had some success with others before," the head nurse said, smiling, though the look hardly reached her eyes. It was a sad thing to smile over. "I hate to put this on you—"

He grinned. "Don't worry about that. Do you have some spare paper, perhaps?"

Quietly, he knocked on the door to 303.

The ward was tiny despite the idea that it would fit two patients at a time, a small space and a mere sheet pulled between the two beds. It only had one occupant currently, though. His new charge, sitting on her bed closer to the door, unresponsive when he peeked his head through the door.

"Kasukabe-san?"

The girl sat quietly, staring up at the ceiling, her hair spread out like a dark halo about her head as if she were already halfway into the other world. Though she had recently been pregnant, she was a tiny girl, probably only coming up to his nose despite the fact that he himself was no tower.

He put the clipboard up on the table across from her room and took the extra paper instead. Pulling a chair from the table, he set down at the foot of the patient's bed and started cutting the paper.

The sound, fairly quiet in other situations, was loud enough to breach the otherwise silent space, and it did at least draw the girl's eyes down toward him. He acknowledged her gaze with a careful smile and bow of his head, but he merely continued doing as he was until he had a perfect square cut from the regular 8x11 sheet of paper. Once finished, he started folding.

"I'm sure you remember in grade school, the story of the thousand cranes and Sadako, the girl that made them after the Hiroshima bombing?" The crane he made was practice-perfect, the wings perfectly symmetrical and the head and tail tapered to a fine point. He held out the small thing to her. "We'll get you started today."

Absently, the patient plucked it from his palm, stared at it blankly.

"I'll come back tomorrow and make another one. Maybe show you how to, if you're interested?" The nurse's smile widened. "Until then, keep a hold of that for me."

The nurse made good on his promise the next day at the beginning of his shift, knocking once more and popping his head through the doorway. The girl was awake, though at his knock she had turned her head to the door, and he noted that she still held onto the small paper craft.

He held up proper origami paper this time. "Want to give it a try?"

They were on 87 some days later when the patient spoke for the first time to him. "What am I wishing for?"

The nurse looked up from where he had been folding the tiniest crane yet, from some of the discarded paper they had from cutting up normal sheets. He met her eyes, and was struck by how young she was still. He then tried not to laugh at how stupid it made him feel, since he was not that much older than she. "Well, I'm not sure. I just like to make them, and sometimes it helps others out, doing something like this." He tilted his head in contemplation. "I can't really begin to imagine, but, well, I'm sure you have any number of things to wish for."

"Because of…that."

"No," he said, shaking his head vehemently. "Because you're young. Because you're a girl," he teased. His teasing smirk gave way to a more sympathetic expression. "Because you've been stuck in a hospital for a while. Doesn't have to be because of that in particular." He shrugged.

She was silent for a while longer, and he finished his tiny crane, hardly larger than a ten-yen piece.

"Wishes are stupid, they don't change anything."

He gave a sad smile down at the next piece of paper she had started on, despite her words. "Well, I don't know. I've yet to get to a thousand before."

254. It had been over two weeks since they had started, and the girl had not had any drastic fits since. The doctors were talking about releasing her, though the head nurse had spoken on his behalf. "Give her a little more time, the poor child."

He had started, on occasion, to come in before going home after his shifts were done. They had started folding things not of regular or origami paper, sometimes candy wrappers and the occasional get well cards she had accumulated over her stay.

"Do you think…" she had said out of the blue the evening of the head nurse's comments to the doctors, "that…it…she…would have a wish?" The child Kasukabe had miscarried was far enough along to have identifiable sex.

The nurse frowned at that. "I'm not sure."

Kasukabe had stopped her folding, was looking out the window of the darkening sky. They had pulled aside the curtain to decorate the rest of the room with their gathering hoard of cranes, and she sometimes stared off out to the sky. "I'm sure…sure she did."

"Oh?"

The girl was suddenly a nightmare, a terror, her face contorting in anger, one fist crushing the latest half-made crane. She stared out, her rage toward the heavens, her rage in the strength of her tiny hands. "She would have wished to live…"

The nurse shook his head, though he knew she was no longer paying attention to here, to now. "You can't start thinking about that—"

"She would have wished to live…to live! And she can't! She can't live…because of me, because I'm here, not someone else! And I hate that, I hate that!"

She shoved her covers up and started for the window, a scream tearing from her throat. The nurse slapped the emergency control nearby and knocked over his chair to get to her, grabbing her by the hands when she went to flail at the window. More figures came into the room, and when others had Kasukabe restrained, the nurse glanced back to the window's shiny surface—

Her reflection behind his; she pulled violently at the other nurses in an attempt to spear her body at the window, a simulacrum of her own self.

The doctors agreed to keep her for a while longer.

Besides that night, she had since calmed again and not had any further bouts. He had continued to visit, and despite her words, she had continued to fold. They were almost to 600.

"She would hate me, you know," Kasukabe said, her voice quieter than a pin drop.

"No, she wouldn't."

"She would curse me if she had a voice," Kasukabe said. "She curses me now, where nobody can hear."

"No, she doesn't."

The girl paused to look to him, and though her voice was fierce, her stare was weak, ghostly. "And how do you know?"

"I know." The nurse smiled, though it was a sad smile, a smile earned in the face of a world where a girl endured the misfortune of a lost child. "Let me tell you a story."

There was a world of magic.

In this world, little girls could make wishes, wishes for anything they desired. Wishes for good things: to see their friends happy, save lives, keep families together.

But where there are wishes, there are curses as well. To make such a wish, these girls would have to give up their own happiness. They would have to create despair that would become curses in this world to make the wish come true.

To make a good wish, an evil curse would be necessary.

So with the wishes for happiness, for the good around them, these girls would feel equal sadness and curse the world in their despair.

One girl believed this to be wrong. So when her time came, she made her wish:

No girl shall ever curse others because of the despair they wrought.

And so, with her wish, she took on everyone else's sadness, their pain, their loneliness, their despair. She made it so that those who had wishes could face the world and say "I will not curse you."

She made it so only the good remained, so those with wishes could smile in the end.

"And what was the girl's name?" Kasukabe said, staring out the window again.

The nurse smiled. "Madoka."

"Nice story, I guess."

He shrugged. "So, don't think about curses. Just think about your wish."

And as she stared out the window, he continued to fold.

They had made it to 914 when she had said, "I'm being discharged soon."

The nurse nodded. He was already folding number 915. "I heard."

"I want to finish before then."

He grinned. "Good plan." Realizing something unsaid, he asked, "Do you have a wish, then?"

She stared down at the one she had just made out of a discarded pink card envelope from one of the other patients. "Wishes are stupid."

"Mm."

She sighed. "So I guess it'd be a stupid wish, to be fitting."

He raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"For your story to be true, maybe." Kasukabe flicked the crane in hand across the room as if it could fly, then reached for the next piece of paper. "Or maybe I'll just wish that my own sadness go away."

The thought that they were one in the same passed through the nurse's head, that she wanted to be forgiven of her perceived transgression against her unborn child. He nodded. "That sounds like a good wish."

She was to leave the next day.

A female nurse had come in to give her the last checkup for the evening. Kasukabe had stared at the new face. "Isn't Tatsuya Kaname-san coming?"

The nurse gave a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry, but Kaname-san is undergoing tests for his schooling. He wants to be a doctor, you know."

"I didn't." Kasukabe started feeling a little guilty over never asking about her visitor. "Why'd they send him to me, anyway?"

The new nurse leaned in conspiratorially. "Well, he's oddly been helping out a lot with the girls. Some of us think he likes flirting."

Kasukabe gave a dry stare. "Really."

Giving a faint giggle, the nurse waved that off. "Honestly, though, he talked a bit with the head nurse about, well, things like this." There was no need to mention what this was, Kasukabe knew it was certainly related to situations like hers. "His mother had a miscarriage. I think he's on a crusade to help everyone that faces such a thing."

"I see."

The nurse gave her an appraising look. "Don't you think he's helped?"

"I guess."

She absently finished 1000, considering whether she should leave him a thank-you note.

When Kasukabe woke the next morning, her cranes were gone.

All of them.

Gone.

For a moment, she was as hysterical as before, darting around her room for any signs of the little things. When another nurse came in to check on her, she demanded to know whether someone had trashed them all.

"No, nobody should have been here since last night at nine," the nurse said.

So even as she started getting dressed to leave, Kasukabe would search again as if the paper animals would remove themselves from hiding or suddenly appear again as if they had been invisible. But by the time she was ready to check out, nothing had appeared.

When she finally made to bid farewell to the room, however, something across the way caught her eye and she realized, in her still moment, that she felt a faint breeze.

The window had been left ajar.

Kasukabe went to it, went to pull it closed, imagining the child-like vision of each of these paper cranes taking flight out the opening. As she did so, a slip of paper fell from the corner of the frame, fluttering up like an errant leaf by the flush of air pressure that came from the window being closed. She caught it, held it up to read:

Of course your wish can come true.

-Madoka

For those that have suffered this,

Remember,

You are not alone.