Paper Saints - by Favor Ekanem

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” —Walt Whitman There is a boy asleep on the bus stop bench opposite from mine. His head rolls to either side every few seconds, as though his dreams are too heavy for his neck to hold. The sun is lowering itself slowly with the turn of the evening, spilling what looks like liquid gold across the roofs of passing cars and smaller houses. A woman nearby is peeling an orange with a certain needless caution, taking the skin off in the usual smooth spiral. Somewhere behind me, a radio is playing an old gospel song too softly for me to be sure of the lyrics, but I’m sure it soothes me like the kind that soothed me on early Saturday mornings before mother made me do the usual chore run. Everything is happening, yet I sit very still; trying not to disturb it. Sometimes I think doing so; staying silent, is the only way to exist in a world so loud with activity. If I move too much, I become part of the noise. Yet if I sit quietly enough, the world forgets me and reveals itself in all its entirety. It is in this stillness that the world first makes her visible to me. In this silence, I see her. She is sitting on the pavement, not on the bench, with her knees pulled to her chest like a child who has misplaced the directions to her home. Sheets of paper are scattered around her feet. Neither books nor notes in sight. Just plain, white paper. Her fingers are moving. Folding. Unfolding. Folding again, and each crease and fold is made with such care that I feel an odd shame for all the careless things I have ever done with my hands. It takes me longer than I care to admit, to see she is making birds. Birds made from the white paper, with wings so precise they seem capable of flight any moment now. I watch her for a long time before she looks up and catches me in the act, our eyes meeting. “Do you want one?” she asks. She does not seem shy. Neither does the question seem to come from a place of boldness. It is simply… there. I nod, and she holds the bird out to me but does not stand. I have to come down from the bench to receive it. When I take it from her fingers, I notice that her nails are stained faintly blue, like she has been handling ink for days. “I’m Ifreke,” she says. “Etuk,” I reply. She smiles as if this exchange has been ticked off her checklist, and before long, we start meeting every evening after that, though it was never explicitly planned. I just know after I get back from work, and am waiting for the strength to return to my body, I will see her. She sits on the pavement, I sit on the bench. And between us, paper birds multiply like dying leaves during the dry season. Ifreke, I noticed, never seems to run out of paper. And I never seem to run out of things to notice about her; The way she presses her lips together when a fold is imperfect, the way her shoulders relax when the wings come out perfectly symmetrical, the way she looks at each finished bird for a moment before placing it beside her, as though she is a mother duck, accounting for her precious (if mindless) ducklings. “What do you do with them?” I ask one evening. She shrugs. “I leave them,” she says finally. “It sounds kind of weird, but I like knowing I made something that doesn’t need me afterward.” I turn that sentence over in my mind for a long time, wondering if it’s careless or diligence or either one dressed as the other, before Ifreke switches the topic, and now tells me she doesn’t like sitting on benches. I find myself mindlessly moving with the new current, “Why?” “I don’t know, they make me feel like I’m waiting for something,” she says. “I’m not exactly a fan of waiting. I prefer arriving. Crashing, almost.” “You have a particular place you want to arrive at, to ‘crash’?” “Wherever I want.” I want to say that she seemed to be waiting every time I see her, but decide against it. Then I begin to suspect that Ifreke does not live in the same world as the rest of us. Or maybe, she lives in it more fully than we do, and we are the ones briefly passing through. The suspicions rise when she asks me questions I do not know how to answer, and have barely even spared thoughts to, “Do you ever feel like your body is too small for the things you feel?” “Do you think thoughts are tangible under the right circumstances?” “If you could step out of yourself for five minutes, would you recognize the person you left sitting there?” Each question lands lightly like one of her carefully folded crafts. Only the crease in them are so well-done, I cannot undo it once it is in my possession. One evening, Ifreke is not there. The pavement is empty save for a single sheet of paper lying flat against the ground, and I look around before I pick it up. It is creased in the middle, as though a bird had begun there but lost the will to finish itself. I sit for a few minutes, before I take the paper home with me without a real reason. The next day, she is back. “Did you miss me?” she asks lightly, as though she had only stepped out of a room and returned. I do not answer, only hold out the paper to her, “You forgot this.” She looks at it for a long time. “I didn’t forget,” she says. “I wanted to see if you would take it.” I feel something tighten in my chest, and as if she senses it, she smiles. “You did.” We start walking together after our evenings of folding, but never far. Just around the block. Past the woman who sells roasted corn, past the mechanic shop that never seems to get rid of that smell of burnt oil. Before we walk pass the church with the flickering fluorescent cross She walks very close to me, but is careful to never touch me. Sometimes, our shoulders brush, and I feel a strange awareness of where my body ends and hers begins. “You are a very quiet person,” she says one night. And I shrug, “I don’t have much to say.” “I don’t think that’s true,” she replies. “Not in the slightest. You are just afraid that if you speak too much, you’ll say more than you need to.” I do not know how to respond to that, but Ifreke begins giving me the birds she makes; one for each evening. I take them home and place them on my windowsill, where they line up, almost identical but not quite, but all staring out into the room like silent witnesses to my daily life. Soon, my room begins to feel crowded, and not by the birds. By Ifreke. I start noticing things differently, and I start to see her in my dreams. In the first one, I do not see her, yet I am sure she is around, watching. In each of dreams that come after, we are at one of the places we pass in our regular walks, but we seem to be doing one thing or the other, and the nature of whatever it is eludes me when I wake up in my cold sweat. I do remember one dream, however. In it, we are at the park bench. And she is folding something again. But it does not take me long this time to see it is no longer a bird, even though it starts as one. She is folding the wings, when the one on the other side is now closely resembling an arm, and the whole of the figure is now in a humanoid shape. I want to reach out and ask for it, but my hands do not obey me. She holds the paper saint down, and extends each arm to the point it reminds me of a certain Jewish Messiah. I awake, and find myself mirroring the pose; arms outstretched and legs together. What I find odd however, is I do not have a cold sweat on that day. The days that follow, I begin to notice other things; the way light hits the sink in the morning, and the way my own breathing sounds too loud in the dead of the night before I go to sleep. It feels as though I have begun to be overtly aware of my existence, and the things around me. “Do you ever think,” she asks one evening, “that people are just paper waiting for the right hands to craft them?” For the first time speaking to Ifreke, I laugh. “That’s a strange way to see things.” She shakes her head. “No. Think about it. Everyone’s all flat until something happens to us. Something arranges us and gives us our shape.” I look at the new folds of birds at her feet, “And what are you trying to make?” She looks at me then, properly. With an intensity that feels like I’m in another dream with her. “I don’t know yet,” she says softly, then looks to me. “But I think soon, I will.” The day she does not come back, there is no paper left behind and no half-folded bird. There is no sign that she had ever been there at all. I wait until the sun has completely departed and given way to night, while I sit on the pavement where she used to sit. People pass me. The world continues its loud, and active living and everything is happening as it usually does and should. Everything but she. I go home and look at the windowsill, the birds are still there. Perfect, Unmoving, and patient. I doze off, and dream again. Again, I am at a bench with her, and again, she has a creased saint in her hand. My body obeys me this time, and I am able to reach out my hand as she offers it to me. I look to it, and wonder if I can bend it as one would a doll before I look up. Ifreke is gone. I still have it when I awake; the saint, not a bird. As I lay there, staring at my window, I realize, for the first time, that I do not remember her face clearly. I only remember her hands and the way they expertly moved and how she enjoyed the process of making something from nothing, and then letting it go. I look down at my own hands, “Do I no longer need you, Ifreke?”

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