The Ram (22 page)

“What are you afraid of?”

Peach thinks of Nell, the way her body moves to the tune of money and men, how she’s a prize to be won, all other competitors to be outsmarted or outplayed even if they don’t know they’re in the game. And then the idea of Nell fades and it’s replaced by a vision of Peach. But it’s not the Peach who’s present, sitting across from Camille and her Chinese food. It’s a Peach of elemental strength, ritualized power and universal knowledge.

It’s Perfect Peach.

It comes out then, without thought.

“I’m afraid of myself,” Peach says. “Of me. I’m terrified of me.”

Camille breaks her eye contact then and tosses the white takeout box in the trash. She flips on a candle warmer next to her seat and shakes her head at Peach.

“What?” Peach says. “I’m serious.”

“You’re shallow,” Camille responds, “but it’s better than what you’ve given me before. You can start with it.”

“How?” Peach asks, able to give advice to her own clients, but blinded by her own problems, just like everyone else.

“I say you use the Peach you want to become as the motivator. This new ideal of yourself can become your taskmaster of sorts. If you don’t stick to your goals and dreams, new Peach will be disappointed in you. She’ll chide you for your laziness or lack of commitment. Ruler to the knuckles type of thing.”

Peach smiles a bit at the idea. It’s clever, really. To use the Peach she aspires to become as the catalyst for her transformation. Ends, or end in this case, causing all of the means. Perfect Peach wouldn’t accept failure or backing down. Perfect Peach
is
someone to fear when that fear produces action. And those actions will bring her into being.

“I think you’d be reported for giving that advice to one of your clients,” Peach takes her fingertips away from her face, tears flicked to the carpet, and tucks her hands under her seat. “But it’s genius. I get it.”

Her coworker reaches over and punches Peach lightly on the thigh. “Girlie, if you’re not happy being you and want to change your path in life, let that future Peach keep you on the right track. Future existence, prompting current existence, so the future state can occur. It’s enough for a metaphysical treatise. I think I should have been a philosopher. Or a screenwriter. I could sell a script to Christopher Nolan.”

Peach hops up and gives her coworker a hug. She can tell Camille is stunned by the physical affection and pats Peach lightly on the back.

“I’m feeling horrible,” Peach says matter-of-factly. “I’m rescheduling my appointment with Michel and going home. I think my chow mein was off. I’m dire sick.”

Camille flicks her hand at Peach and winks. “Right. Sick. Got it.”

Peach leaves Camille, tidies up her office, gathers up the folders she needs to take home. They are cases requiring attention later, when her body isn’t shaking with potential. Thoughts batter her mind but she staves them off, letting in only those beliefs concerning capability and invincibility, impetus and journeys.

She exits the glass doors of the office building and can hear the serenade of the frog, his slimy body hidden somewhere nearby. Perhaps her client, Michel, is with the amphibian. Perhaps he watches her aglow with the splendor that comes with knowing her path. Her face is one massive grin, her chest pitched to the clouds above.

This is Peach, ecstatic in her overwhelming, outrageous fear of letting herself down.

Saturday, the 18
^th
of April, 2015

65 Riley

A hail storm slants its icy bullets straight into the tall, double-paned windows of Riley’s bedroom. He moves to his dresser, a heavy piece of oak with leafy tendrils cut into the front panels. It was his father’s chest of drawers, one of the things he kept before he had the estate sale to liquidate his parents’ belongings. He pulls open the top drawer where he keeps his boxer-briefs. The wallpaper-esque drawer liner is from the seventies; chartreuse and yellow daisies cover it. The inside smells of musky cologne and dry wood. It smells like his father, Will Wanner.

Riley lifts up a pile of his underwear and tucks the three cards from Hamal under the fabric. He intends to forget about the messages. He vows to stop rereading the contents of the cards. He swears to stop caring.

With that behind him, Riley gets ready for bed, flossing his teeth with cinnamon-flavored floss. He trims his nose hairs and takes an electric shaver to his upper cheeks and cleans away his partial sideburns. A shower with a plastic bag tied around his left foot, then a bit of Acqua di Gio on his neck so it’s faded a bit by morning and he’s ready for sleep.

He props his left foot up on the bed, each day closer to ditching his crutches. The small line of ink the tattooist managed to get in him is capped by a thread of black scabbing. He lies with his right foot and right arm hanging over the bed. He puts his left hand on his stomach and can feel the muscle there, taut, though he’s been remiss in his exercising since the accident.

Time shifts, the room stays solidly black because of an absent moon. And Riley knows, when he wakes in the morning, he will restart a life of fun and freedom. Tomorrow he will start again. He’ll have sex with Nell, somehow, and the man Riley wants to be again will rise, like the fantastical phoenix, feral and still smoking from the fire.

66 Peach

She wishes she could spend more time with the growing lamb. She comes home each day to find a mess of hay scattered around the tarpaulin she tacked down over the living room rug. Still, the area is festooned with bits of fuzz, slobber and the occasional bathroom mishap. Worse yet is the way the baby looks at her, hopeful with tail high when she enters the room and prone to bleating whenever she leaves. She can only imagine the anxiety and fear the lonely creature feels away from his flock, with his shepherd busy with other pressing matters.

But there’s nothing to be done about it now. She intends to keep the ram, at least for a while. Peach hopes the baby doesn’t cry the entire time she’s gone, resulting in someone deciding to complain to the apartment management. She won’t let the lamb be taken from her. On this point she is immovable.

Peach sits inside the cordoned off area of her living room and the lamb folds his legs and sits happily in her open lap. The creature is already domesticated and attached to her. It worries her that something so fragile trusts her to watch it, feed it. The lamb still doesn’t have a name. She can’t decide what it should be, what would be an appropriate name for the creature she snatched away from its mother on Easter morning. Jesus would be too snide. Wooly and Harry too cutesy and on the nose. So she forgoes any title and dips her head down to nuzzle her chin in his soft coat.

“I’ve got a day left,” she says to the animal. “Just a day to make the ultimate change and take what’s rightfully mine. If it doesn’t happen for me tomorrow with Nell, I have one other option. And if that doesn’t work, I’m finished. There will never be a Perfect Peach. You’ll be sent to a petting zoo and I’ll be resigned to my life.”

The lamb takes up one of her fingers in his mouth and sucks gently on it. His jaw grinds at her bone but there is no pain.

“Let’s make the stars proud of us tomorrow,” she says. “Let me be afraid enough of letting down Perfect Peach, my future self, that I have no other way to go but forward.”

The animal’s bleating is the only response. She hugs the lamb tight to her body and she can hear a steady pounding of hail, imagines how it flattens the browned, spent daffodils outside her home.

67 Riley

Riley dreams of sex with Nell. The dream is silent and full of muted colors. She lies in the middle of a river bed lined with smooth, round rocks, water flowing around her pale body. There isn’t any clothing on her frame and her fake breasts ride high on her chest, her sex shorn clean of hair.

He kneels down in the water. It’s frigid, nearly ice, and bits of leaves and tree bark sail past him on the water’s surface. Nell’s face is turned away from his. She looks over her shoulder, her gaze on something upon the river bank. Riley looks and can see a row of trout, some brown, some rainbow, spitted on a length of willow and then stuck in one of the gaps on a well-balanced, tall rock cairn. Their open mouths face the sky, their tails flaccid and delicate, dipping to earth.

With her attention focused on the fish, Riley pushes his way inside the woman and works at her gently, looking for the cadence of his pleasure. But the intimacy is uninspired and weak and he can claim no end to his task. He plunges, thrusts, and Nell keeps her eyes on the fish.

He can’t feel his legs or his pelvis and he thinks it’s because of the cold water. Soon, his penis is also dead, but he still resolutely keeps at the act. He looks down in the water and his lower body is starkly white, blue veins bulging along the surface of his skin.

And then he can suddenly feel sensations again in his groin and he pulls Nell’s hips closer to him, only to find her hips have changed in size. They are thinner, with a bony pelvic bone he handles with clumsy fingers. Looking up her frame, the breasts have changed. Now they are a bit smaller and softly natural and the red asymmetrical locks are gone, replaced by a short mop of blond hair.

It’s not Nell at all anymore. It’s someone else that he cannot name but knows intimately already. His penis pricks back to life and when he reaches climax, the woman turns to look into his blue eyes and smiles.

“Go fish,” she says.

He collapses on her chest and kicks his legs out in the water, until the current forces his legs upstream and he can see both his feet. The left foot tingles, pulsates, and then before his eyes, his toes sprout anew, bone worming out of the puckered scars. Muscle oozes out of the small holes that pockmark the surface of the bone. And then flesh crackles to life over the striated meat. Nails push free of the skin and Riley is left with a healed foot, a miracle.

The woman sits up and extends her arms to him. He gladly falls backwards into her body and then she lays them both back into the cold of the river, half their faces submerged, their bodies spooning, their limbs tangled in a mess of life.

68 Peach

Peach dreams of Nell wearing a dress of golden fleece, a pair of twisting horns growing from her temples. In Peach’s arms are a spread of apples, tufts of grass held together with tied dandelion stems, chunky blocks of salt. She lays her offerings in front of Nell, who gyrates her body on a stage set up in a field of alfalfa. The plants are capped with vivid purple blossoms. But the woman wants nothing of what she has brought and continues to dance, ambivalent to the gifts. Peach falls to the field, to her knees.

A fire spontaneously ignites far away from the stage, yards and yards away in the field of alfalfa. Peach watches the red and yellow flicker gain force and height. It consumes the plants in its area and then moves in the direction of the stage. She knows it is not a normal fire, that it contains intelligence, because when it sets its current fuel to ash, it cuts a straight line to Nell and Peach.

Apprehension and woe churn within Peach and she knows she’s running out of time. The fire will reach both the women soon and when it does, it will consume them. Peach lifts herself from the dirt and climbs up on the stage to face the dancer.

“Why do you call yourself Nell Hyde?” she asks her.

The dancer responds with a kick of her heels together, a shaking of her torso down to the hard platform. Peach can see the fire approaching, surging for them.

“I need you,” Peach says to the woman.

Nell’s face remains unexpressive, but then she turns her back to Peach. There, right under the short hair of her A-line cut, is a mouth nestled in the fold where skull meets neck. It opens, showing red gums, red tongue, teeth stained red with blood.

“You don’t want me for me,” the head speaks and then smiles.

The fire is close, closing on them, already scorching half of the field which stretches to the hazy horizon. Its hunger is insatiable, its speed remarkable.

Peach pleads with the macabre maw set in the head. “You’re the first key and with you, I’ll take back what’s mine.”

“There are many doors with many keyholes and many keys.” the mouth answers. “So set on me. Foolish Peach!”

When the fire reaches them, the ground is no longer rows of green and brown and purple, but alive with heat and licks of flame. A spark jumps high enough to ignite the golden wool around Nell’s body. She is alight with fire, her skin melting from her skeleton. The lips open once more for Peach.

“Take it from him,” it says before Nell’s flaming corpse explodes into a supernova of energy and Peach, her body gone as well, floats in the void of space, a milky screen of stars behind her consciousness and the energy of human life, a bomb of light and potential, throbbing before her.

Sunday, the 19
^th
of April, 2015

69 Riley

The dream is so vivid that when he wakes, Riley pulls the sheets off his body and bolts up to look at his left foot. He slips the gauze off, looping it around his fingers before just giving up and letting it twirl into a pool on his bed sheet. But he finds only his wounded foot, the sticky points of the stitching, the toes absent.

Even though his toes didn’t regenerate, he smiles to the empty room and lies back in bed. He knows today will be the first day of his new life and he doesn’t feel bad thinking it cliché. No more work. He can coast on the dregs of his bank account and unemployment coupled with the disability checks he might receive because of his lost toes, at least for a time. Because tomorrow he might be caught in a fiery truck or in a herd of panicking animals. These potential vehicles for pain and death play on repeat in his mind now. He cannot shake them but he doesn’t mean for them to take hold in reality, either.