The Ram (3 page)

Linx scrunches up his nose and pokes her in the side. “Did you do something to your hair? It looks a little different. Lowlights?”

“Nope,” Peach says, placing both hands on her head to make sure the wig is still there. “Just the same as always.”

He sits up and takes Peach’s chin in his hands. “Same beauty as always,” and plants a kiss on her neck.

He can’t see her roll her eyes at the gesture or the way her calves constrict when he plays it off smooth. She knows he wants to be more than best friends with benefits, but she can’t give him what he wants. He’s kind, funny, and genuine, but he lacks something. Not machismo; she detests the muscle-bound, the aging fraternity brothers. All she knows is she can’t even give herself what she wants. At least not yet. So she meets him on middle ground and allows for the sex which means everything to Tuksin “Linx” Lincoln and nothing to her.

She pulls back enough to meet his eyes. They’re deep brown, framed by crescent-shaped eyelids. “Let’s go to the bedroom. The wicker on this thing gets uncomfortable.”

Linx pops up, takes Peach’s hands and walks backwards into the bedroom. He whistles the theme song from Jaws as they move toward the bed.

“Are you going to eat me?” Peach asks.

“Maybe,” he says, grabbing her about the waist and flinging her onto the bed. “But I’ve got to use the toilet first.”

Linx moves toward the bathroom but Peach stops him with a mild purr before he can open the door and see her blonde hair strewn across the counter, hanging off the bath towels, and matted into the throw rug.

“But I’m ready. Now. Swim back over here, shark boy.”

He bounds for the bed, landing on his knees and pulls Peach’s legs toward him. He’s almost the same weight as Peach, slight and trim due to his Thai mother. He laughs until he notices the new addition to the bed. His fingers run through a lambskin throw in the center of the duvet.

“What the hell is this, Peach? Tell me it’s not real.”

Peach scoots down so her butt is in the middle of the white wool and works her legs out of her jeans. “It’s soft. And I get a sense of what it was like when it was living. The thing has life to it.”

“
Had
life to it,” Linx corrects her. “Did you forget I’m a vegetarian? Is this some sort of passive aggressive way of telling me you’re not into me or that you want me to start cooking you hamburgers? No way are we leaving it on the bed.”

“I’ll take it off later,” she says, “but if you want to have sex, we’re having it on the sheepskin. Peach parts her legs slightly and reaches up to pull Linx’s shirt and button-down over his head. He shakes out his hair once it’s off and Peach casually reaches up to see if her wig is still on straight.

After she says what she wants, he doesn’t argue. This trait of Linx’s, his willingness to obey, reminds her why she accepts him as a lover and not just her primary confidant. He is the first man she has ever been with who has not demanded to be dominant in the bed and in every facet of partnership. He kisses her body in totality, covering every limb and curve. When he slips inside of her, Peach goes far away. She sees a stage. On it is a woman working a pole, her breasts enormous and fake, her red hair cut in an asymmetrical A-line. Her thighs grip the pole and she cheats gravity with spins around the hard length of chrome. There is music playing but Peach doesn’t know the song. A resonating bass drum pervades the song and the stripper works harder, works up a sweat, loses her top, then her tiny shorts.

Peach locks eyes with the woman dancing in her head. The fantasy woman, the stripper, says two words and Peach hugs Linx in tighter to her chest, her body contracting with shudders of pleasure.

“I’m it.”

05 Riley

There are two children with rasping coughs, an elderly woman wheeling around a colostomy bag, and a teenager with a cold pack against his forehead in the emergency room. A nurse stands with her arms crossed as a woman wearing a track suit screams in her face about the pain in her abdomen. She tells the nurse it feels like there are mice inside her guts, gnawing away at pieces of her innards. The nurse repeats over and over again with a monotone voice that drugs are not administered by the nurses in the ER for stomach aches.

Riley is waved into a private intake room of St. Al’s Hospital by another nurse with a clipboard held down the front of his thighs. Double Al still acts as a living crutch and the PVC piping helps keep the pressure off his foot. Riley feels a little smug about cutting ahead of all the other people in the waiting room. At least extreme physical trauma gets him pushed to the front of some lines.

“Take a left two doors down and get yourself up onto the exam table. I’ll fetch Doctor Lemic to come in and see what’s wrong, okay?”

The nurse walks off and Riley turns his neck toward Double Al. “Yeah, it’ll take a really smart doctor to figure out what happened. Gee, doctor,” mocks Riley, “I have this bunion on my big toe and it just seems to be acting up more than usual.” Riley forces himself to laugh at his own joke, to use a chuckle to distract himself from the agony. The pain radiates out from his foot and affects the rest of his form as if the site of trauma is a distant sun, a dim star, holding sway over all things in his universe, no matter how far away.

Double Al maneuvers himself into the little exam room before Riley, placing a hand on his chest to stop him from trying to walk on his own. He doesn’t allow Riley a chance to protest; he lifts him off his feet and places him on the exam table. The motion dishevels his boss’s work coveralls. Double Al tugs at the zipper running the length of his torso before swiping a magazine off a spare chair and collapsing into it.

The tissue paper lining on the table crinkles under Riley’s slightly padded tan pants. He leaves smudges of dirt and grease on the pristine whiteness. The pain is still unbearable. He looks down to his boot and wonders if he should pull his foot out of it before the doctor gets there, so he can assess the damage on his own. It’s only now he notices his foot is surrounded by liquid, cool and thick. Some of his nerve endings are noting wetness instead of pulsing out the same distress signal again and again. He bends over and shoves a finger into the top of his boot and pulls it out. It’s covered in blood just beginning to coagulate.

“Keep your hands out of there,” Double Al commands as he absently flips the pages of the outdoorsman magazine before throwing it to the floor.

A light mounted on the ceiling tile catches Riley’s attention. It shines blue and a chime rings out every five seconds. The sound is insistent but pleasant and Riley knows that someone must be dying somewhere.

The doctor comes into the room and washes his hands briskly under the tap without greeting Riley or Double Al. The nurse who led them into the back room pulls out a blood pressure cuff and rolls up a sleeve on Riley’s plaid work shirt. He winks at Riley before pumping away at the black bulb attached to the sleeve.

“What’ve we got?” the doctor asks as he shakes the water on his fingers to the floor. He snaps on white exam gloves. Riley wonders if they’re latex or nitrile. The sight of them reminds him of the nitrous he’d be given before his old dentist would pull his baby teeth. “It’s your foot that’s the problem?”

“Might be my foot,” Riley says and grins at Double Al, “but could be inattention to detail.”

The doctor doesn’t laugh or warn Riley he’s about to swing his leg up onto the table. Riley swears under his breath at the sharp shock brought on by the motion. The doctor walks to a drawer and pulls out a large metal tool that looks better suited for cutting wire or shearing sheep.

“Let’s get that boot off and take a look. You want to tell me what happened?”

Riley’s eyes dart toward Double Al. He doesn’t want to say too much, get his boss and his old family friend in trouble. Of course he’s not looking to sue; years of contract law and application of just the right diction and wording to dominate any situation has taken away his stomach for the game. It’s certainly a game he won’t play against someone he actually respects.

“Worksite miscalculation,” is all Riley will give the ER doctor.

Doctor Lemic cuts down the back, front and sides of the boot, sectioning it so it can splay open like a flower with heavy, droopy petals. The nurse helps peel back the layers of leather and the doctor lifts the toe of the boot gently away from the foot and places the sodden mess on a tray behind him.

Riley keeps his face turned away from the mangle he knows is there. He watches Double Al stand up from the chair, his eyes wide and white against his dark complexion. The doctor clicks his tongue, makes a sound of displeasure. Riley can feel the blood that had been contained by his boot slide down his ankle and trickle into the pit of his knee as the doctor keeps his foot hiked high into the air. He wonders how ashen his skin is on his body. He wonders if he could be mistaken for a ghost.

“Oh, buddy,” the doctor says and Riley forces himself to look.

The foot itself, the heel, the instep, the ball, is a mass of swollen black and blue punctuated by small swatches of skin still their normal white. But his toes are not right. His toes can’t even be rightfully named toes anymore. Five pulpy, bloodied digits hang off his foot. He can see bone protrude out of three of the bits of meat. The bile creeps back up his throat, but not due to the pain this time. Due to the view.

The doctor snaps one of his exam gloves at the wrist and tsks again at Riley like the mess of his toes are his fault. Riley accepts it is his fault, but doesn’t like be chided all the same. He wishes he had some nitrous right now, so his mind could be jumbled, his chest prone to heaving with sighs, and there would be no cares to give over his demolished foot.

“Those,” says the physician as he looks at what remains of Riley’s left toes, “are all going to have to come off.”

06 Peach

She doesn’t cuddle after sex and this makes Linx pouty before he drifts off to sleep, oblivious to the sheepskin keeping his legs extra warm. Peach feels mentally energized from the sex but she doesn’t want to get out of bed. If Linx feels the mattress lift and her weight depart, he’ll stir and then whatever time she would have for thought would be gone.

Digging around in the drawer of her bedside table she produces a Mars bar. She opens the wrapper with her incisors and takes a nibble of the chocolate, a string of caramel left hanging off her front teeth. She could only find the confection at Walmart and she cringed each time she had to go to the store and walk the aisles under the fluorescent lights of Americana. But she did it for the candy. It was necessary.

She puts the chocolate down and picks up the book she began reading a few days back, a John Carter novel entitled
The Gods of Mars
. Her favorite part of the story isn’t really the science fiction, the escape scenes, the romance. Her favorite part of the story is the frame surrounding the tale of John Carter and his return to Barsoom, the planet typically known as Mars. It’s the story of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his claim that his chronicle is a true account of actual deeds. She delights in Burroughs’s way of meta-storytelling, putting himself in the fiction while trying to import John Carter and the denizens of Mars into reality. Plus, the man had a link to Idaho and she feels very connected to her home of Boise, the lava rock-strewn steppes outside the city and the brown mountains to the north. Reading his work makes her feel connected to where she is and reading about Mars makes her feel connected to where she might be going.

There are times Peach feels like her life has been a piece of fiction. Until now. Until this point in time when she’s committed to bringing the
real
Peach into existence.

The bloodstone pendant rests on her chest. She pulls the sheet over her bare breasts and puts the book, pages down, on her stomach. Eyes closed, she listens for the calm breathing of Linx indicating he’s long past waking. She lets her mind float about. She thinks of those painful skinned knees when she was a child, the meat pocked with sand and tiny rocks around her patellas. She thinks of her first try at making love when she was nineteen, how painful it was not just physically but in the deep muscle of her heart. All the memories would become stories now,
were
already stories, and the present would become a story, too. The only reality Peach desires is the reality of the future. In the future, she would move from her own fictionalizing to facts.

Peach lies in bed for hours, thinking, watching tracers of light zoom around the backdrop of her closed eyelids, the blood running through the thin membrane creating a crimson screen upon which to watch the floaters and the strange shapes. She dozes for a bit and then snaps awake and picks back up her wondering about it all. And about what it would take for her to become bona fide.

07 Riley

They tell him he’s lucky he didn’t lose more blood with the extent of the trauma to his foot. All the same, they’ll have to amputate the toes quickly to combat the forces of gangrene and its partner, blood poisoning. Riley has no ability to logically protest the cutting off of five of his toes. It’s lose them, or lose his life, and while the thought of checking out from his downward spiral is tempting, it’s not powerful enough to make him go to his casket all because of a desire to have a full set of toes.

He is prepped for surgery and the last memory he has is of an attractive anesthesiologist entering the room. She has bow-shaped lips and golden eyeshadow and Riley finds himself aroused and not ashamed at the response of his cock. He doesn’t wonder if it will calm down by the time he’s through surgery. He just stares into the doctor’s eyes and thinks about the one instance in which he watched amputee porn. The woman in the film was missing both legs, sliced clean from her body right under her pelvic bone.

“I want you to tell me all your pets’ names, starting with last pet and working toward your first,” the anesthesiologist says, placing an oxygen mask over Riley’s mouth and nose. He answers her, muffled responses through the mask. He begins with the chocolate lab he had when he was in his early twenties, the one that liked to catch squirrels and hold them in his front paws without killing them. Harlequin. But then he’s in the black of stopped consciousness before he can speak another name.