At the origami counter the afternoon smelled faintly of paper and tea. Each crane received a timetable no bigger than a postage stamp, folded so neatly the ink barely dared to wrinkle.
We asked at the window, where a girl was holding her crane as if it were a ticket. "It bowed to the inkwell first," she said. "Then it looked at the sill the way a bus looks at a stop, and only after that did it wave one wing."
The shopkeeper keeps a quiet notebook by the brushes. One line reads: please do not fly until the windowsill has nodded; the geranium prefers a greeting. A neighbor had whispered that the cranes were late on purpose, but it turned out they were only waiting for the ink to finish drying its polite little hat.
The next morning the same girl came back with her brother. The cranes were already practicing: a small bow, a smaller nod, and then a single wing-wave, saving the rest of the sky for whoever remembered to say good afternoon to the sill.