The Ram by Erica Crockett Page B

think they do it?” Peach poses the question to her dinner mate and cleans a bit of the osso buco sauce up with a slice of crusty bread.
    Linx twirls his pappardelle around on his plate. A piece of wilted spinach clings to his fork. “Mating. They’re fighting over the woman sheep, Peach.”
    “Ewes,” she corrects him, envisioning a bizarre creature with the head of Angelina Jolie and the thick, black body of an unshorn sheep. Peach was expecting Linx to give her that answer. Something rote and textbook. Linx had the tendency to avoid deep consideration of questions when he could pop off a basic answer and get back to more pleasant conversation. But she felt the rams must like the pain. She imagines how it must feel to crush bone on bone, to smash your head into another person’s head and come out victorious in whatever it is you’re fighting for.
    She supposes both humans and sheep do battle in the same way. With their heads. One powered with wit, the other, with hormones. In some human cases, with both wit and hormones, or neither.
    “Right,” she says, “but there are always enough ewes to go around. I think, in the end, the rams are fighting more for themselves and less for the flock of sheep.”
    Linx puts down his utensil and takes up rubbing the plant again. He opens his mouth to speak but Peach beats him to it.
    “I guess the question is, do you make the decision to fight or not fight? Choice. That’s what makes up the plot of our lives. To ram skulls or not? Even if it kills you.”
    Linx releases the plant and waves down the waiter. A man in black pants and a white button down arrives at the side of the table and Linx orders a panna cotta with black cherry sauce for them to split.
    “You’re radiant,” he tells Peach, over-enunciating the word, “but you can be confusing. So, you want to make some life changes?”
    “You’ve known me for years,” she replies. “I need to change. I need a big change.”
    What he replies with catches her off-guard. She coughs on a piece of salty crust as it travels down her throat.
    “I like you as you are. But if you want change, then be my partner, my girlfriend. Officially. That would be a change. We’d be out of the limbo we’re currently in. I could actually sleep over.”
    “Linx,” she starts but doesn’t get a chance to explain away her inability to commit with some small falsehood. Linx holds up a hand for her to stop.
    “I know. Not now. Not yet. I’m not the change you’re looking for, right? Even if I’m nothing like Adam.”
    The name makes Peach put down her fork and drop her chin.
    She looks down at the cut of meat left on her plate. Some delicate, fresh baby was butchered for her meal. And she’s taking the lamb’s energy and using it to power discussions about a relationship she doesn’t wish to have with her best friend. The lamb could have lived its life on a hillock of deep green pasture instead. But it was now a part of her meal, in this dish and dancing with the bile in her stomach at this very moment.
    “Do you know,” she starts, noticing the waiter making his way through the crowded dining room with their dessert, “that the recipe I’m eating is traditionally made with veal? But it can be made with any sort of meat. Because what died in order to make something phenomenal isn’t important. It’s the cut of the meat that is.”
    Peach lifts her hand and pokes a finger straight though a marrow-less section of bone. Linx barely looks at her, his mind on his inability to lock down his heart’s desire.
    “Osso buco means ‘bone hole.’” She brings the bone up, held by her index finger. A trickle of juice and sauce smelling of wine and thyme runs down her wrist. “This is what I feel like sometimes, Linx. Hollow bones. And if you can’t use them to fly, you just feel like you’re made of emptiness.”
    Linx reaches over and presses the bone and her hand back down to the plate. The waiter lifts an eyebrow at Peach as he