Free The Ram by Erica Crockett Page A

another frog when she closes the door behind her, but there are never the sounds of croaks near her apartment. Too much concrete. So she walks behind her apartment to a grassy common area between three separate buildings which house six apartments each.
    Using her hand, she tests the cold grass for dampness before sitting down and pulling her knees up to her chin. Peach stares at the sky. The moon has yet to rise, but the light pollution from her neighborhood kills the brilliance of the stars overhead.
    But she’s patient. And as she looks up, her eyes focus on the points of white beginning to pierce the ambient light and make their own light known to the woman sitting on the chilly earth. The stars come out like wary survivors of a war, passing through haze and obscurations to state their existence to someone, anyone. Peach is that someone. She thinks of it as a blessing.
    She presses her fingertips to her lips and blows kisses to the universe, picking out the stars she knows by name and flinging them her love and devotion. But the faraway sun she cherishes most isn’t in the night sky right now. She’ll have to wait until long after the heat of summer leaves Boise to see it hang in the black expanse overhead for longer than an hour after sunset. By then, the star will be poised high, parallel to the North Star, but Peach will be enamored with another star. But this is how it will work. Heavenly, burning bodies taking turns at having importance to Peach.
    “I want to be different. Give me strength, give me the courage to make the transformation. I want to be the true Peach. As Michel says, Perfect Peach. I want to take what’s owed me. I want to shine!”
    She talks to the one star she desires to see shining, speaking to it in its absence, until Linx comes out to find her, a plate of lukewarm chicken in his hand. The stars tell her he’s coming long before she sees his shadow walking across the hilly ground to where she sits. They give her enough time to be silent and act as if they’d not been conversing.
    The stars tell her many things. Except whether or not she’ll be able to get what she wants out of life. That’s the mystery they keep from her. But she understands the game.
    “I’m famished,” she tells Linx. He offers her a hand up and they walk in silence back to her home. She thinks, while they walk over the grass awakening from its winter respite, there could be all manner of living creatures slumbering underneath her feet. They would not know of her or her ability to shine.
    Regardless, she still beams.
     

23 Riley
     
    He notes the way his house smells when he’s been away from it for a few days. When everything is closed up and fresh air isn’t allowed inside, the place gets musty thanks to a broken air conditioner line that spewed water into his crawlspace last summer. He sneezes, hobbles around on his crutches to open up windows. With each pane of glass he slides up, a frigid cascade of air pours into the room. He stands in front of the window in his guest bedroom, having half-skipped his way upstairs, and lets the cold night breeze smack him in the chest.
    He has a retro style rotary phone on the bedside table in the guest room. Riley takes a step toward the bed and when he’s a few feet away, he leans the crutches against the side of the mattress and pitches forward, throwing himself face down on the fluffy comforter. He turns his head, blows his shaggy, blond hair out of his eyes and thinks about picking up the phone.
    It’s midnight. And while one of the people he wants to call might still be awake, the other certainly isn’t. Besides Double Al and Walker, there are only two others who mean a thing to him. And he reasons he should tell them about his amputation and the falling anvil. But he knows it can wait until morning, or another day when he’s not tipsy from too many fingers of Maker’s Mark.
    Toes and fingers, fingers and toes.
    He clenches his fists tight and relaxes them. Over