It started when Mara folded a thunderstorm into a paper crane.
She was nine, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor while her mother argued with the rain on the roof. Not figuratively—her mother actually shouted through the ceiling vents, cursing barometric pressure and her ex-husband in equal measure. The rain responded by slamming its fists harder, causing water to drip from the cabinets and the dog to hide in the oven.
Mara, unbothered, tore a page from the phone book and made a crane. As she creased the final wing, the rain stopped. Outside, not even a puddle could be found.
The next morning, the headlines read:
LOCAL WEATHER VANISHES. METEOROLOGISTS BAFFLED.
Mara didn’t say a word. She simply started folding again.
By fifteen, Mara kept a shoebox of weather in her closet that included hailstorms folded into frogs, fog swans, and a cumulonimbus bull that had once threatened to flood Saskatchewan.
One day, a fire started in the garage, and she turned it into a salamander and kept it in her sock drawer.
She sold a snowflake fox to a collector in Tokyo for enough yen to pay rent for a year. However, when he tried to unfold it, it dissolved into sleet and shredded his winter garden. Mara refunded him and kept the fox locked in a mason jar.
Her mother barely noticed the shenanigans because she was busy dating an arsonist who claimed to be immortal. He wasn’t.
On her twenty-third birthday, Mara met Zain at a gallery show called Conceptual Catastrophes. He stood for a long time in front of her sculpture, Hurricane in Three Acts (Crane, Phoenix, Unfolding), and said, “This feels… honest.”
Mara replied, “Most weather is.”
He didn’t laugh—but he didn’t leave either.
By their second month together, Zain discovered her other folds—the high-pressure rabbit, the lightning spider, the draught beetle sealed in wax.
“You’re folding real things,” he said with wonder peeking from behind his eyes. “How do you do that?”
She shrugged. “I just crease them until they obey.”
He asked her for a tornado.
She said no—but he kissed her anyway.
Zain was a philosopher with a knack for losing time. He once misplaced an entire Thursday and insisted the calendar was gaslighting him. He kept small notebooks full of diagrams titled Causal Loops in Emotional Geometry and Entropy and Apologies.
Mara liked that he never tried to unfold her, so she gave him a storm snail that whispered barometric truths in ancient Greek. He named it Harold and carried it in his coat pocket.
The trouble came when Mara tried to fold absence.
It started with a sharp breath on a Wednesday. Her mother had left a voicemail:
“You didn’t call. I’m not angry, I’m just… what’s the word? Echoing. I think that’s it. Also, it’s raining inside again.”
Mara didn’t cry, although she wanted to. Instead, she tore an old page from her dream journal and started folding.
The crane she made didn’t contain rain, or fog, or even silence. It contained everything she’d forgotten to grieve.
When she released it, it flew backward, causing the sky to crack and the sidewalk to ripple like a banner in a breeze. Zain caught her as she fell, and suddenly she was seven again, then thirty, then nowhere.
Eventually, she reappeared, but she was in a version of their apartment where all the clocks ticked counterclockwise. Zain was pacing a Mobius strip on the floor.
“You folded absence,” he said. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
I think I deleted Wednesday,” she whispered.
“You deleted all Wednesdays.”
Harold the storm snail was spinning like a top. Mara scooped him up and tucked him into a paper thimble.
They sought help from the Paperwright, a retired meteorologist who lived in a floating greenhouse and spoke in Fibonacci sequences. He examined Mara’s folds, sniffed the tornado fox, and tasted the rain crane.
Finally, he handed her a single leaf of black origami paper and warned, “This is not for folding. This is for remembering.”
She took it and tucked it in her shoe.
Once they had arrived back home, Zain asked, “What will you do with it?”
“Fold it,” she replied.
“Mara—”
“I know.”
But she did it anyway. She folded the paper into a heart. It wasn’t a symbol nor a metaphor. It was an anatomical, ventricled, and flawed human heart.
It beat twice, and then fell still.
All around them, time hiccupped, and then continued. The clocks behaved, and Wednesdays returned.
However, Zain started blinking wrong in photographs. His shadow sometimes went ahead of him, and he forgot how to pronounce the word ‘because.’
Mara noticed the oddities, but said nothing. Instead, she began to unfold her weather. One by one, she released them. The thunderstorm crane returned to the sky with a roar. The fog swan melted into a silver river. Even the drought beetle scuttled into the soil, and daisies bloomed in its wake.
On the night of the solar eclipse, Zain vanished. Mara found a note made of lightning paper that read: I remember you. Even the part you folded.
She cried for the first time in years. Then she folded the note into a kite and let the wind carry it away.
Years later, a child knocked on the door of the old apartment. She was holding a soggy paper fox and a spiral-bound notebook labeled How to Fold Feelings.
Mara invited her inside, and the girl said, “My mama said you taught the rain to listen. Can you teach me?”
Mara, older now, smiled. She opened the drawer where she kept the paper rain crane and said, “Yes, but first, we learn to unfold.”
About the author:
Rod A. White has operated a full-time writing/ghostwriting/editing business since 2010, providing articles, blog posts, ebooks, books, and other writing services to a global clientele. Rod entered semi-retirement in 2025, allowing him more time to pursue his passion of writing and art in the form of short stories, novels, screenplays, comic books, graphic novels, illustrations, etc. He has published a supernatural romance novel titled Reflections of a Ruby Pendant, and he has won several awards for his short story works. Besides his story in Flash Point SF, two other short stories of Rod’s have been accepted recently: one will be published in an upcoming anthology of Crimson Quill Press, and one will be published in an anthology of Dragon Soul Press.
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