Authors: Erica Crockett

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mythology & Folk Tales, #Mythology, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Suspense, #Occult, #Nonfiction

The Ram (26 page)

The lamb continues his bleating and Peach goes to him, swinging her legs over the gates to enter the fenced off area of the living room. He rushes her thighs, bumps her with his soft forehead and rubs the lanolin from his skin onto her red dress. He pulls away and she can see his white wool smudged with a bit of blood. She looks down and can’t see the red liquid on the crimson dress. She wonders how much of the tattooist’s fluids she’s managed to track into her car and her home. She’ll have her work cut out for her with clean up. She recalls the last time she left flecks of red around her space, after the night she spray-painted deep ruby Vs onto major street intersections throughout Boise.

Peach attaches a nipple to the bottle and bends down to offer it to the lamb. He snatches at it with soft lips and rivulets of milk slip out of the corners of his mouth. She drops to her knees and holds the bottle while regarding the blotch of blood on the lamb’s head. Both the animal and she have been marked by blood. She has the tattooist’s blood mixed in the fresh ink on her scalp. She hadn’t planned to massage his life force into her open pores but she’d been called to claim it and her tattoo as trophy. In the scant light, the blood on the lamb is merely a dark smear. It could be anything: soot, soil, oil. But Peach knows what it is.

It’s power.

She pats the lamb on his back and closes her eyes again, the weariness taking over.

“I’m sorry I took your flock downtown,” she says. The lamb slurps away. “I’m sorry your mother had to give birth to you in such foreign and stressful circumstances. You should have been born on grass, cold and yielding and green. I’m sorry for you, and for your mother and for your sister.”

She calls to mind the work and planning it took to get the hundreds of sheep into downtown Boise. She remembers the warm slime on her arms plunged deep into the lambing ewe, pulling the second of two lives, a second lamb out of the sheep. She’d left the female with the mother and absconded with the male. She leaves the memory alone and comes back to the present, feels the glass container jerk against her palm as the baby takes his sustenance.

And Peach thinks nothing of her empathy for the lamb and her apparent inability to empathize over the spent life of the tattooist. Then she remembers the lamb still doesn’t have a proper name. And then it comes to her.

He finishes the bottle of milk and she pulls the flexible nipple away from his mouth. She plants a kiss on his black nose, her lips coming away wet, the smell of animal and sour liquid permeating the back of her throat.

“Your name is Roman,” she tells him and cups her fingers around his soft, warm ears. “You’re named after a saint, a sacrifice, a helper of Perfect Peach.”

02 Riley

He must have slipped into sleep. Riley shoots up, the vertebrae in his spine cracking as they stack, and looks around the room for a clock. When his eyes locate one, digital numbers glowing in lime green, he sees it’s just after 2am. The bedroom in which he finds himself is foreign. Heavy, dark drapes keep the room free from any light from outside and the headboard of the bed smells of cedar. An amber glow emanates from a night light shaped like the Sydney Opera House. He looks to his right and sees Nell Hyde, the stripper from Blaze Lounge he pursued and bedded, passed out next to him. Her form is splayed out at sharp, joint-bending angles and her sequined, black booty shorts are missing. Her neon green tube top is tucked under her large breasts and a sizable mole just above her right nipple rises and sinks with each inhalation and exhalation.

Riley immediately thinks of escape.

He’s still drunk, but he’s not so drunk to be experiencing brown outs—those stints of lost time and unrecorded awareness that aren’t severe enough to be labeled as black outs. He recalls the sex he had with the stripper. Rather, the bouts of sex they’d had. Their rutting had been unusual, even compared to the backlog of Riley’s varied and robust sexual experiences. She’d express moments of rapture, holding tight with her knees as she rode Riley. And then she would go slack, her limbs soft, and the spark of light in her eyes would dim. In this state, her body would automatically go through the motions of sex but he knew her mind was adrift in different seas. She’d murmur something about fire and the Australian town of Coober Pedy, train tracks and childhood monsters.

Though his hands are tingly, his vision slightly blurred, he’s sober enough to realize something is wrong with the woman. And he has no desire to stick around and take the blame for her blitzed, drugged-out mind.

Riley rocks his hips around on the bed, testing to see if Nell will wake when he moves. Her body remains corpse-like and he stands in one fluid motion, pokes around the floor for his pants, stumbling only once and upon finding them, pulls them over his bare buttocks. He can’t locate his shirt; his hands sweeping over the thick carpet and around the base of the bed produce nothing. There is a lamp on the bed stand but he won’t risk clicking it on.

On a small armchair in the corner of the room lays a lump of something. Riley can’t make it out so he goes over to it and feels at it. It’s soft, knit. He holds it up close to his face, forgetful of what he wore to the strip club that night. The fabric is threadbare in some places and it smells of musky antiperspirant. He throws it back down.

The shirt belongs to Sev, the Australian poet with control issues. Nell’s boyfriend.

“Shit,” he murmurs to himself. “I’m in the asshole’s bedroom. If I’m here, where the hell is he?”

Logic and fear should partner in this moment, act to push him toward the exit of this unknown home and away from his dastardly doings. The thought of Sev returning, finding him leaving the jersey sheets and the embrace of his paramour should make him fly faster. But instead, Riley is torn. The reasonable part of Riley tells him to get out, go home and sleep off his drunk in his own king-sized bed. But the part of him that desires the wildness of life wins over.

Riley goes back to the bed and takes Nell by the shoulders and shakes her until she bats at him with limp hands. She keeps her eyelids closed and he leans over her with his face close enough for them to bump noses.

“You want to fuck again?” he asks and she answers with a nod, her head flopping around on her neck.

His callous, self-important screwing will need to be quick. Riley is hard from knowing he’s in Sev’s bedroom, having sex with the girlfriend Sev fought so hard to protect from Riley. The poet could open the bedroom door any moment and find himself a cuckold. This widens Riley’s smile. Nell releases quick, quiet grunts while he works on her with his fingers, never opening her eyes to look at his face. He nearly enters her without a condom but then remembers to suit up before pushing in and spending millions of futures inside of her. He leaves her lying with her ear snuggling her shoulder, her ribcage cocked up and off the mattress. She looks to be in a strange sort of yoga pose: The Marionette du Riley or Congress of the Stripper.

“Get some sleep,” he quips, but she doesn’t respond. He can tell she’s already passed out, from tiredness or chemicals or both. Her navel slowly sinks back down to the fitted sheet. On his way out of the bedroom, his whole foot—his good foot with all of his toes—catches on his lost shirt and he scoops it up and tucks it under his sweaty armpit. He sniffs and catches his own body odor and the funk of sex permeating the air in the room.

There is no desire to stay and poke around Sev’s domain. He leaves the house, passing through as few rooms as possible to reach the exit. The night air is bracing; the flesh on his bare chest prickles and rises. Yet he doesn’t put on the shirt. He feels raw and untouchable.

He looks back at the front door he’s just shut behind him. It’s a dusty brown color with a welcome mat at its base made of woven plaits of colorful fabric. He’s happy he’ll never see it again.

He tries to imagine Nell’s face but it’s already fading—her sharp A-line haircut, her fake tits. He’s taken what he wanted from her. The pursuit of Nell had been undertaken to make Riley feel more manly and in control. The booze in his blood makes his memory of this night murky. But he knows he got her away from Sev and completed what he set out to do.

He won. He screwed. He now feels remarkable and accomplished.

There is a smile on his face as he walks to his car.

“Been there, fucked that,” he says to the night.

Coming June 22, 2016

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Chemicals
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About The Author

Erica Crockett published her first novel,
Chemicals
, in 2014.
The Ram
begins
The Blood Zodiac
, a twelve-book series delving into myth, serial killing, and astrology. When she's not penning novels, she's writing comics and short stories or traveling the globe. Erica resides in Boise, Idaho with her husband and pets.

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Praise For The Blood Zodiac Series

Monday, the 23rd of March, 2015