Harriet didn’t always go to the bakery with the awning that was just a bit too large. Often, she just bought her sweets from the supermarket. When she’d lived at home, with her parents, she’d never bought herself pastries at all; the scent of burning sugars and inflating cakes from her mother sufficed. When she did go, she went in transition: from a Mrs. to a Ms., from a parent to a mother, from staying in Ohio to living.
There was a particular smell to the bakery: the scent of linens, clean, but not fresh, resting beneath an assault of sugar. Sometimes, if Harriet had a particularly clean nose- if she had remembered to take her Claritin daily- she could detect the scent of cologne on the old woman. She’d wondered if it belonged to the woman’s husband, if she put it on every morning as a reminder, or if it was the remnant of an embrace. Overtones of the smell changed. Near Christmas: cinnamon and artificial pine, on Wednesdays: windex, and once, when Harriet was buying a muffins for her daughter’s class: fresh grass.
…
“Would you like me to put them in a box?”
“Yes. Well actually, could you just put the muffins in? Would it be possible to keep the cookies separate? I’d like them in a bag. Or, actually, no, the cookies probably don’t even need a bag. I’m bringing them to my kids. They’re just in the car.”
“The cookies are for your kids? Well then, I suppose I’ll give you a little milk. The kids need that nowadays. They don’t get enough of it at school.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“My kids had plenty of milk, I made sure of that. That comes to 14.83.”
“You only take cash, right?”
“Mhmm, there’s too much plastic in the cards too, isn’t there. Too little milk and too much plastic.”
“Are they grown now?”
“Who?”
“Your kids.”
“Oh, yes, for a while now.”

…

The scent lingered on Harriet, but it washed away. The woman’s linens and sugar and cologne all cascaded off Harriet down the drain, spiraling into the ocean. Deep down there, the salt would cover up the scent; it always does. Or even before she met water, the woman sometimes just faded. The scent would be masked by Harriet’s movements, and then suddenly, slowly disperse. She didn’t always visit the woman with the forehead that was just a bit too large, but the supermarket didn’t quite smell the same.

She could fold the woman up if she tried. There were lines to show her how. The creases would guide her. The woman could fit into her clavicle, if she could just keep her shoulders flexed. She could fit the woman in the spaces between her toes if she tried, or maybe even between her own eye and eyelid, tucking the frail legs neatly into the pupil itself. The paper skin would fold itself around the woman’s own bones: a corporeal crane. She already held the lines of past foldings: mountain fold cheek to brow bone, blintz the corners of the knees and elbows together, pleat the bottom of the foot. Creases around her eyes: her entire body collapsed into the sockets.
Once, on one of those days where Harriet didn’t go to the bakery, she’d looked up the instructions for a paper crane. She delivered thousands of cranes into the world, one after the other, still and odorless, resting on her desk, and then tumbling onto her floor. She wrote notes in the cranes and gave them to her children in their lunchboxes. She could fold a crane with her eyes closed, using her muscle memory. With her hands closed, using her memory.
She visited the bakery on a Thursday in the quiet time resting between morning and beginning. She reached across the counter and held her hand out to the woman, who nodded and stepped over the glass display of iced cookies and glazed muffins. She was surprisingly light on her feet, not so much agile as weightless. Harriets’ hands began to fold the paper of the woman’s skin: mountain fold cheek to brow bone, blintz the corners of the knees and elbows together, pleat the bottom of the foot. She worked slowly, careful not to rip the delicate paper, finally holding a single perfect crane in her hand. A crane that smelled of linens, clean, but not fresh, and slightly burnt sugar. She kept the crane-woman inside the back of her eye for a week, tucked away safely, without fading. Every so often she took the woman out and smelled her, careful not to inhale the crane itself. Gradually, the paper smelled of Harriet’s own eyeliner and contacts. The tiny crane turned her eye an angry red, veins beginning to pulse outward.

So, she gently blinked the woman out. She carefully unfolded every crease and pleat and mountain fold and blew her back into life. She apologized for trying to keep her and trying to fit her behind her eye, and she brought her back to the bakery with the awning that was just a bit too large. The woman was very polite and it took a week to whisper hello to a month until she smelled again of linens that were clean but not fresh and of sugar that stuck deep within your throat. When Harriet went to the bakery, which she did not always do, she no longer smelled the slight undertone of cologne but a vague smell of contact solution seemed to sometimes linger.