The Ram Read Online Free Page A

bloodied digits hang off his foot. He can see bone protrude out of three of the bits of meat. The bile creeps back up his throat, but not due to the pain this time. Due to the view.
    The doctor snaps one of his exam gloves at the wrist and tsks again at Riley like the mess of his toes are his fault. Riley accepts it is his fault, but doesn’t like be chided all the same. He wishes he had some nitrous right now, so his mind could be jumbled, his chest prone to heaving with sighs, and there would be no cares to give over his demolished foot.
    “Those,” says the physician as he looks at what remains of Riley’s left toes, “are all going to have to come off.”
     

06 Peach
     
    She doesn’t cuddle after sex and this makes Linx pouty before he drifts off to sleep, oblivious to the sheepskin keeping his legs extra warm. Peach feels mentally energized from the sex but she doesn’t want to get out of bed. If Linx feels the mattress lift and her weight depart, he’ll stir and then whatever time she would have for thought would be gone.
    Digging around in the drawer of her bedside table she produces a Mars bar. She opens the wrapper with her incisors and takes a nibble of the chocolate, a string of caramel left hanging off her front teeth. She could only find the confection at Walmart and she cringed each time she had to go to the store and walk the aisles under the fluorescent lights of Americana. But she did it for the candy. It was necessary.
    She puts the chocolate down and picks up the book she began reading a few days back, a John Carter novel entitled The Gods of Mars . Her favorite part of the story isn’t really the science fiction, the escape scenes, the romance. Her favorite part of the story is the frame surrounding the tale of John Carter and his return to Barsoom, the planet typically known as Mars. It’s the story of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his claim that his chronicle is a true account of actual deeds. She delights in Burroughs’s way of meta-storytelling, putting himself in the fiction while trying to import John Carter and the denizens of Mars into reality. Plus, the man had a link to Idaho and she feels very connected to her home of Boise, the lava rock-strewn steppes outside the city and the brown mountains to the north. Reading his work makes her feel connected to where she is and reading about Mars makes her feel connected to where she might be going.
    There are times Peach feels like her life has been a piece of fiction. Until now. Until this point in time when she’s committed to bringing the real Peach into existence.
    The bloodstone pendant rests on her chest. She pulls the sheet over her bare breasts and puts the book, pages down, on her stomach. Eyes closed, she listens for the calm breathing of Linx indicating he’s long past waking. She lets her mind float about. She thinks of those painful skinned knees when she was a child, the meat pocked with sand and tiny rocks around her patellas. She thinks of her first try at making love when she was nineteen, how painful it was not just physically but in the deep muscle of her heart. All the memories would become stories now, were already stories, and the present would become a story, too. The only reality Peach desires is the reality of the future. In the future, she would move from her own fictionalizing to facts.
    Peach lies in bed for hours, thinking, watching tracers of light zoom around the backdrop of her closed eyelids, the blood running through the thin membrane creating a crimson screen upon which to watch the floaters and the strange shapes. She dozes for a bit and then snaps awake and picks back up her wondering about it all. And about what it would take for her to become bona fide.
     

07 Riley
     
    They tell him he’s lucky he didn’t lose more blood with the extent of the trauma to his foot. All the same, they’ll have to amputate the toes quickly to combat the forces of gangrene and its partner, blood poisoning. Riley has no