The Ram by Erica Crockett

Peach has soft, yellow yarn for hair and a cherubic face. The doll’s dress is made of blue, clingy fabric that gets snagged on the Velcro closure of Peach’s backpack. She gets by in the house, with this set of man and woman, by carrying around a version of herself.
    Until she hears the man and the woman speaking one afternoon while she does her math homework at the island in their kitchen. They’re talking about finances in the other room and Peach only catches some of what they say. She doesn’t make a point to listen intently. She learned long ago the trick to staying in foster homes longer than a few weeks was to be as complacent and silent as possible.
    But then the woman says something about Peach and income. And then the little Peach, the fake Peach made of plastic and a soft, cotton body is brought up. It turns out that the doll was not bought just for her. It was used, a hand-me-down from the last girl who was in the house.
    Peach goes to her room and shuts the door. The doll is on the bed and she scoops it up in her arms and cradles it close to her neck. The plastic is impregnated with the smell of baby powder and smooth to the touch. She looks into fake Peach’s eyes and frowns.
    Peach knew her eyes were hazel, not green. But she had been told otherwise, told what she should be, and she did her best to be it because “being it,” whatever people wanted her to be, was the key to survival in the foster system. She pulls the pencil she was using for her long division out of her pocket and throws the doll down on the bed. Over and over, she plunges the pencil through the green eyes of the doll whom Peach feels has more identity than her. The doll never tries to be anything but a doll. A doll with green eyes. The pencil tip breaks, a sharp point of graphite sails off into the carpet of the room, lost.

Fall, 1990
     

25 Riley
     
    He plays a Native American, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, in a short kindergarten skit put on for students and their parents right before Thanksgiving break. The entire play lasts fifteen minutes. One of the ears of corn gets distracted by a tune only she can hear and breaks into a spastic, jerky dance while Riley delivers his line. He stays stoic—as he imagines all Native Americans are from what he’s seen on television—and puts his hand on his chest.
    “I bring eel to eat,” he says and then he bows, a touch all his own.
    And his parents cannot get the costume of the paper bag headdress and the apron made of scrap suede from his mother’s sewing stash off of his body. He insists on staying a Native American and his parents joke that he’s “gone native,” turning their faces away to laugh when he hollers out battle cries and whips an imaginary horse around their living room settee.
    The Alberstons bag goes soft and rips from continual wear. The suede is stained with his sweat and lunchtime sandwiches of peanut butter and raspberry jelly. When he speaks to adults, he’s polite and sparse with his words. But when he plays with his friends, those children he’s identified as part of his tribe, he’s untamable, free of pretention. Riley decides he should stay a Native American forever.
    His interest in eel as a food plagues him and thus his parents, and at his constant prodding, they finally look into getting him some eel to eat. Except Boise, Idaho is not near an ocean and does not have a significant Japanese population. There is nowhere to find eel as food and so they compromise with Riley and take him to a pet store with an extensive aquarium section.
    There he presses his nose to rectangular containers full of saltwater and spies the electric blue eyes of a monster. The eel has an elongated face and a strong underbite decorated with needle-like teeth. Its mouth gapes open and Riley opens his in response. He locks eyes with the fish that looks like a snake, held captive by its strange presence. His parents pry him away and he cries on the ride home, ripping his