The Ram by Erica Crockett Page A

headdress from his hair as white as beach sand, tossing it to the floor mat at his feet.
    His mother turns around and smiles at her son, her hands grasping the side of the passenger seat. Her wavy hair billows around the headrest and there is a smear of purple lipstick on her upper teeth.
    “I see you’re done being a native?” she asks and then pats him on the leg. “That’s good, Riley. You’re not a real Native American anyway. All your ancestors came from Europe a long time ago. You don’t need an excuse to be a wild little boy. Europeans have been wild enough through the ages.”
    When he hears this from his mother, he stops his crying about the eel and desperately tries to reach down to the torn and crumpled brown bag at his feet, lines of crayon approximating feathers and beads at the rim of the cap. But his seatbelt restrains him, his arms too short to get back the costume and put it on his head. He’s helpless, unable to go native again and sits back, feels the anger necessary for a resplendent tantrum building in his head and gut and finally screams and weeps because he is nothing more than a plain, white boy.

Saturday, the 28 th of March, 2015
     

26 Peach
     
    She wears a dress that dips in a wide V down the front of her chest. The deep burgundy color complements her skin tone, making her white flesh luminescent in the candlelight. The dress had been too long even for her long legs, so she had to hem the bottom. The stitches were crooked and if one looked closely, it was easy to see the slinky fabric was bunched and bulbous because of the poorly done sewing. But Peach was counting, yet again, on people’s inability to notice details. So many of her choices were riding on that one assumption alone. Most people were so inattentive, so enraptured with themselves, she was convinced she could commit murder here, in this fine Italian restaurant, and someone would order another glass of Prosecco.
    Linx picks at a sprig of rosemary alive and thriving in a small pot in the center of their table. He rubs one of the dark green needles and then brings his hand up to Peach’s nose.
    “Smell that. That’s what all of Tuscany must smell like,” he says and then pours himself a glass of water from a carafe stacked with ice and lemon.
    Peach pulls up on her dress. The cut was unusual for her to wear. She didn’t usually enjoy showing that much breast, and as soon as she got to the restaurant and noted how Linx was staring at her chest, she regretted her choice in attire. She hadn’t put the outfit on for him. It was for her. A celebratory gesture, something suggested to her when she spoke the other night with the stars. Peach had to treat herself right during her time of transformation.
    “The meat is a bit dry. It should just fall off the bone. But the tomatoes are vibrant,” she says and pushes the lamb osso buco around on her plate. She doesn’t particularly enjoy eating lamb, but she had to have it when she saw it on the menu. She thinks of a paper placemat she read at a Chinese restaurant in late January. 2015 is the Year of the Sheep.
    “You look nice,” Linx says and takes a swig of water. “Beautiful, I mean. Not nice. Nice is too plain. Radiant? I like radiant. Wait, that’s a word, right?”
    She smiles at his question and nods at him and then at her dish. Linx’s first generation American status meant he struggled with vocabulary on occasion. He was better off than his mother, a tiny Thai woman, petite even by her own country’s standards, who spoke nearly all her sentences in a mishmash of English and tonal Thai.
    Sawing a piece of meat from the hollow bone in the middle of her dish, Peach brings the flesh up to her tongue and bites down mindfully. It tastes like springtime.
    “Have you ever seen how rams will just run at one another, the males, that is, and butt one another so hard with their horns they become dazed and just stagger around for a moment? And then they do it again. Why do you