Free The Ram by Erica Crockett Page B

and over. Blood rushes to his hands and they heat up, solid, warm flesh rebelling against the chilly air of the room. The bedspread is soft from years of use. It’s made of gray and black fabric, with a faded pattern of geometric shapes along the sides. His dad went with him to pick out the comforter before he went away for his freshman year of college. Riley had liked the somber colors and the design. He thought it was suited to Stanford, whatever that thought had meant to his eighteen-year-old brain.
    Design, construction and art push away his thoughts of calling anyone at all. He runs his fingers over the bedspread and then, with his right index finger, his hand begins to trace out a set of shapes. He traces it five, six times without knowing what it is he doodles with his finger as a stylus. He can keep his nail on the fabric and only pick it up once and put it back down once to get the entire design down. He cranes his neck up and over to his right to try and watch what it is his body is doing without conscious effort on his part, but the only light that comes from the open window is weak, a street lamp down the road from his cul-de-sac.
    If only he had a pen and some paper, he could get the doodle down and make sense of it when he was less inebriated. But his body is leaden, his foot tingling with promises of elevated pain, because the alcohol and OxyContin are wearing off. He pushes his face into the worn bedspread and lets his finger drawn lines on the old cotton without giving it further attention.
    “I’ll remember to draw it in the morning,” he speaks to the room. And then he’s in the void of sleep, waking with a start only once when a dream takes him to a possible world, an alternate reality where he lost both feet to the serrated teeth of a monstrous fish and upon escape from it, he lay with his belly soft against the earth. His thick, near-black blood seeped into the dirt, helping the powers of spring in their task of thawing the clay and sand, letting the earth take away his life.

Late Winter, 1992
     

24 Peach
     
    When her foster parents hand her a Cabbage Patch doll with sandy blond hair and green eyes, they tell her they had it made special for Peach and she can name the doll Peach or any other name she’d like. They tell her the doll was made to look just like their new ward, to welcome her into their home.
    Peach doesn’t point out the one problem with the soft-bodied doll: Peach’s eyes are hazel, not green. But she sleeps with the doll at night, aware at nine years of age, she should be breaking the habit of liking dolls, not getting new ones. But the house is a new place, the woman smells of chicken soup no matter what she eats and the man sets out to work an hour ahead of schedule so he can bike alongside all the cars on the road instead of drive alongside them. This house is nothing like the home from which she was just ripped away. That house was a home. This house is a house. But the doll is comforting and she takes the people at their word, that they got the doll especially for her.
    She goes to a new school, eats at a new dining table. This one is oak. She sleeps in a double bed, not a twin bed, and has her own room this time. She does her best not to think of the Barrows or her foster brothers and sister, the people who’d been with her in the house turned into her home. Six weeks have passed since she was removed from there, deposited here. And the doll remains at her side while she learns to live in this house. Peach looks into the flat, painted eyes of the doll and decides maybe she does have green eyes. This man and this woman have given her a doll that is supposed to be just like her. And if they say she has green eyes, she must have green eyes. So she stares into mirrors, turns her head toward light, away from light, and decides yes, her eyes indeed are green.
    And when she has truly convinced herself her eyes are green and not hazel, she finally names the doll Peach. This