Jane V. Blunschi holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. She was a 2014 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices fellow, and her collection of stories, Understand Me, Sugar, was published in 2017 by Yellow Flag Press. Jane's Pushcart Prize-nominated work has appeared in Paper Darts, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Foglifter, among others. Originally from Louisiana, Jane lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Hand to Mouth

Jody spent a solid ten minutes every Friday night organizing her supplements and medication into a white plastic box divided into seven sections. She’d spent months searching for the perfect pill box, but found the price of this one - $5.99 - daunting. She took a picture of it and searched it on Amazon, where it was a dollar cheaper, but the tax and shipping made it closer to $7.00, and those calculations made her feel suddenly disgusted with herself, so she drove to Whole Foods and bought the pill box and a couple of kombuchas, plus a candy bar that cost more than the pill box, which she ate in her car, slowly, before going home and cleaning her new, excellent pill box with 409 and a paper towel.

She took down the bottles of supplements and medicine: vitamin B, vitamin C, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Nexium, turmeric, digestive enzymes. Clicking open the separate compartments, she loaded them in one at a time. She placed a bottle of iron tablets and prenatal vitamins off to the side, because she took those alone, at night, when she remembered, because they upset her stomach.

After that, Jody started eating. She turned the broiler on and placed two slices of bread on a pan, and covered each with butter and a slice of cheese. She poured a glass of vanilla soy milk and squeezed in a glob of honey. Downed it. Poured another, this time with cinnamon sprinkled on top. There were a couple of apples in the refrigerator, so she cut one up and scooped into the jar of crunchy peanut butter she kept in the door. Her ex-girlfriend Elise hated cold peanut butter, so Jody bought her a jar of her own to keep in the pantry.

The broiler started smoking, and she reached in and dragged the pan onto the top of the stove. The edges of the bread had blackened, but she could see that the cheese had browned perfectly, and that the center of the bread would still be soft and pillow-y. Almost like cotton when she bit into it. Like biting a cotton ball, she thought.

Jody exercised every day, but on Saturdays, she doubled up and exercised herself to death, doing an hour of cardio on a stationary bike and then taking a hot yoga class at the gym near her house. Sometimes she ran on a treadmill or outside, but no matter what, she looked forward to dragging her sweaty, already-sore body home before noon to shower, eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then take a long nap. One Saturday, she noticed she’d parked crooked when she’d arrived at the gym, so she got back into her car to move it. The battery was dead. She cranked the key a few more times and then walked inside and got on a stationary bike. She thought about calling someone to come and get her, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone so she walked home.     

Who would she call, anyway? Her parents lived in Biloxi and her friends were treating her like glass because her heart was broken, which got on her nerves. Calling Elise was out of the question. Doing that would lead to fighting or sex or fighting and sex and she was trying to take a tolerance break. It wasn’t exciting anymore, just painful.

There was one person, she remembered, while she was taking a shower. There was a woman she’d taken on two dates, but never kissed. Jamie was the woman’s name, and she was definitely not Jody’s type. They looked exactly alike: five ten and lanky, with black hair cut in a quiff. Soft butch tomboys with tan lines on their biceps and outlines of their wallets on the back pockets of their jeans.

“She’s got these big, sexy, rough hands,” she had explained to her friend Oliver over drinks one Friday night. “She works on campus in the Ag school.”

“Doing what?” Oliver stirred his vodka soda with a cocktail straw. “Bailing hay? Feeding calfs with those humongous baby bottles?”

”The books,” Jody answered. “She’s an accountant.”

“Oh,” Oliver said, looking deflated.

Jamie had an office job, it was true, but she still looked the Ag school part, wearing jeans and Carhartt Henleys to work. The thing that she didn’t tell Oliver was that Jamie hadn’t put those big, sexy, rough hands on her yet, not really. “I should stop all this. I’m supposed to be doing something else.”

“Someone else?” Oliver took a little sip of his drink through the skinny black straw.

“No, bitch. I need something more. I think I need something I can’t get from another person.”

“That’s cute. That sounds cozy.”

”You’re a dick, my man. I’m trying to improve myself over here,” she laughed.

“I know. I know you do your therapy worksheets.”

“Fuck you.”

“You go, girl. You go, boss bitch. I mean girlboss. You don’t need a pair of rough hands for nothing.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Do some yoga.” Oliver downed the rest of his drink and flagged the bartender. Jody ordered another Diet Coke to go and put a folded ten in the tip jar.

Jamie was at Jody’s house to pick her up within the hour. She drove Jody to her car and gave it a jump and then asked Jody if she was busy that afternoon. “I’ll take you to a movie. Or we can get ice cream.”

“I want that.”

“Which?”

“Ice cream.”

Jody insisted on paying, and they both ordered a double scoop of cookies and cream. “I know you want to be like me.” Jamie raised an eyebrow.

“I think we’re a lot alike already,” Jody answered.

They finally kissed that afternoon on the back porch at Jody’s house. She’d invited Jamie over to watch a documentary about Isaac Mizrahi on Prime, and they’d sat politely on opposite ends of the couch together, drinking iced tea. At one point, Jody went to the kitchen and rinsed a couple of bunches of green grapes for a snack. She wrapped the colander in a towel and placed it on the couch between them and their hands brushed occasionally when they reached in. One of the times this happened, Jamie hooked her index finger over Jody’s and pulled it toward her. She lifted Jody’s hand out of the colander, to her lips, never taking her eyes off the television. Jody felt her face flush and her nipples get hard.

When the documentary ended, they sat on Jody’s back porch and lit cigarettes. It started to rain, and Jody rested her cigarette on the edge of the porch and ran into the yard to rescue a papier-mâché project she was working on for a class, a five-foot tall peace crane she’d painted white with pale blue stripes to resemble loose-leaf notebook paper. Jamie helped her drag the whole thing onto the porch and blotted the base with a dish towel while Jody patched a couple of soggy spots that were threatening to cave in. “What class is this for?”

“Fabricated Image. Paper.”

“Grad.”

“Yeah, I’m almost done. How’s Ag?”

“Ag is okay. Actually, something amazing happened yesterday.”

“Oh, cool.” Jody picked up her cigarette and moved closer to Jamie.

“Mmmhm. I sent around a form for some profs and the Chair to sign and send to the dean and they did it.”

“Okay.”

“No, they just did it. All in one day.”

“Right, so—”

“No, that’s a big deal. That feels like a miracle.” Jamie straightened up so that she and Jody were eye to eye.

“So the bar in Ag is really low,” she tilted her chin and exhaled a plume of smoke at the ceiling.

Jamie reached for Jody’s waistband and pulled her closer. She held Jody by the waist with her thumbs on Jody’s hip bones and kissed her.

Jody didn’t know where to put her hands. She was the one who reached for a belt buckle, or hipbones. She was the one whose hands knew their way around a waistline, who knew exactly where to rest her thumbs - ribcage, underwire, tip of the sternum. She finally rested her palms on Jamie’s shoulders and leaned closer, returning her kiss with some intensity, some muscle.

Jamie wasn’t having that. She drew back and looked Jody in the eyes. She gave Jody’s hips a squeeze. “I’m driving,” she said, kissing Jody’s jawline and her neck.

Jody flicked her cigarette into the yard and moved her hands to Jamie’s hips, sliding them into the back pockets of her jeans. She took Jamie’s earlobe between her teeth, “I’m driving.”

Jody sent Jamie home after fifteen minutes of vigorous kissing, promising to call. The next morning when she stepped outside to collect the newspaper, she found a glass jar full of daisies, a fresh pack of cigarettes, and a peace crane fashioned from loose-leaf notebook paper on the doormat. Written in red ink on the crane’s wing: can I see u 2nite?

She took a picture of the pile of surprises and sent it to Oliver. I can’t I can’t I can’t do this right??

She texted the same picture to Jamie. Of course. Come over at 6? Come over now if you want :)))

She took all of her meds and supplements with a glass of hot tap water. While she waited for the coffee to finish brewing, she stood at her kitchen counter and unraveled the peace crane Jamie made for her and folded it back more precisely. The red ink disappeared over the side of the wing. She unraveled it again and re-folded it along the original lines. It was kind of sloppy compared to the ones she made, but she let it be sloppy. Let it be the crane Jamie had made for her with her own two hands. She took a piece of junk mail lying on top of the recycling bin in the kitchen and folded it into a new crane - sharp, tiny, perfect.

She’d learned how to make the cranes from a YouTube video a couple of months before after Judith, her therapist, recommended she find new ways to deal with her stress. “It should be something you’re just average at. Don’t try to master it, just keep the stakes low.”

“I guess I could join the gay intramural soccer team.”

“Jody, that’s the same as what you’re doing now.”

“How?”

“Running. Exercise? Competition. Do you think you won’t want to excel at that if you start?”

“Oh.” They decided that Jody would start with one thing she was curious about, but didn’t feel like she’d get intense and uptight about: origami.

She mastered the peace crane after five or six tries, and then started making them out of any paper she could find that would fold. She made some from aluminum foil. From wax paper. From pages of cookbooks she bought at a library sale for a dollar apiece. She built a long, flat bin from plywood and painted it white and threw the cranes in as she made them. She couldn’t just throw them away, and they’d begun to cover most of the flat surfaces in her house. She stored the bin on the bottom shelf of her pantry, next to the cans of soup and extra cases of LaCroix.

When Judith asked, Jody told her she’d abandoned origami for crosswords, and that she was just okay at those. She couldn’t tell her about the five hundred or so cranes she’d collected, much less her project, which she’d named Maximum-Strength Crane. She knew Judith would fuss. Jody just didn’t want to be average at anything.

Jamie did come right over. Jody answered the door in the boxers and t-shirt she slept in and Jamie stepped back, surprised. “Oh hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you weren’t ready.”

“Ready for what? Come in, I have coffee.” Jamie stood in the front hall while Jody went into the kitchen for coffee. She remembered, from one of their dates, that Jamie liked cream in her coffee, but all she had was oat milk. She heated a little in the cup in the microwave and poured the coffee on top. “Here, come on in.”

Jamie took the cup, but didn’t move to follow Jody into the living room. “Why don’t we go into the city? We can be there by lunch time and spend the afternoon.”

“I need to work on my project. I’ll make brunch, though.”

“What if I get you back here by five?”

“Alright.” Jody washed her face and stood in front of her closet. She put on a black bra and a white tank top and cutoffs. She put on some mascara and a squirt of Rose 31 and walked back into the kitchen. “Do you want a popsicle for the road?” She opened the freezer, “I have grape and red.”

“Red?

“Yeah.”

“Red isn’t a flavor.”

“It is.”

“What does the box say?’ Jamie walked into the kitchen.

“Cherry, but what kind of cherry tastes like this? Here, just take a grape, mercy,” she handed the popsicle to Jamie.

”Why don’t you put on something nice? I want to take you somewhere nice.”

Jody laid her popsicle on the counter and took a sip from the cup of coffee she’d left there. “What?”

“Put on something pretty. You smell amazing.” Jamie put her arms around Jody’s waist.

“Let me see what I have.” Jody went to her room and closed the door, and then she stood in her closet and closed that door, too. She called Oliver and told him what Jamie said.

“Doesn’t she know you? What do you have on now?”

“Hang on,” Jody took a selfie and sent it to Oliver.

“Oh, alright, Madonna. I like that black bra situation, that’s hot. That’s perfect, what you’re wearing. I mean damn, it’s just an afternoon in New Orleans.” Jody heard someone talking in the background. “Kelly’s still here,” Oliver said. “Okay, Kelly said she’ll bring you a dress.”

“Oh, Kelly. Kelly’s so pretty. I didn’t know she was there.”

“Yeah, so let’s wrap this up. I think you should wear that ho pride Madonna outfit. Fuck a dress, dude, that’s not you. She needs to take you as-is.”

“I know. Okay.”

“Kelly said she celebrates you. She sends a kiss to you.”

“Tell Kelly to call me.”

”Bye, bitch.”      

Jamie looked surprised when she walked back into the living room in her cutoffs. “I’m going to stay here and work on my project, I think. We can go to the city another time, maybe.”

“I’ll help you. What do you need to do?” Jamie stood up and Jody moved toward the front door. She opened it.