We’re announcing a new annual prize!
The Wreck Beach Prize for Prose will be PRISM international’s second in-house prize. Like our Earle Birney Prize for Poetry, this prize is worth $500 and will be awarded annually.
And with that, we’re thrilled to announce the inaugural winner of the Wreck Beach Prize for Prose: Christine Ottoni, for her story “Plastic” published in Issue 58.2.
Plastic
By Christine Ottoni
After I made the decision to get the operation, I asked Moira to meet me for a drink.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, after I’d told her.
“I am.”
“Why?”
“You know why,” I muttered and sipped the cocktail Moira had ordered for me. Something sweet with gin and egg white. At first I’d asked the bartender for a cranberry soda but Moira cut across me. She hated drinking alone. I liked knowing little things like that about Moira, all the eccentricities that made her a whole person. Her favourite dinner was crackers and cheese. She lost her virginity in a tent during a thunderstorm. I never expected to have a best friend but Moira and I just ended up that way. Like two orphans fighting over a bone in the street only to look up and we had more in common than we’d originally thought.
“Which parts?” Moira gave me the up and down, considering my nose, fingers, shoulders, and stomach. What I’d be willing to part with. “Not more than one?”
“No,” I said. “Just a special area.”
We both knew what area I meant. That made Moira quiet. She considered me for a minute, chewing her lip, deciding if she should start arguing with me now or later.
“What material are you choosing?”
“Plastic.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “It feels right.”
Moira loved me fiercely but she never understood my issue with the area in question. She couldn’t. Moira wasn’t religious, she was raised agnostic, but she was, in a way, a bit of a zealot when it came to sex. She believed in the beauty of it, its cosmic humanity. Every fuck, for her, was an acid trip to the moon. And that made the central drama of my adult life totally unfathomable to her.
Moira had stick and poke tattoos scattered up her legs and arms, in places where she could reach to do them herself with a needle and ink. Among the collection on her forearms: a watermelon slice, a rocking chair, a viper. She grabbed my hand across the table.
“You can’t do it,” she said.
“Come on.”
“You’re giving up.”
I pulled my hand back.
I couldn’t meet her eyes. Moira always believed I could work past my problem. More therapy, more medication, the right exposure. Just put yourself out there, practice makes perfect , that kind of thing. But when operations and replacements started becoming more common, when it wasn’t just ads in the subway anymore, but people walking around with synthetic gold toes or hot pink silicone kneecaps, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I wanted the operation. I wanted my problem, the area, to become plastic. Smooth and forgiving. Unfeeling. Like a doll or silvery android from a movie. Something unformed in alien utero without a name or a purpose.
We sat like that for a while. I stared down at my drink until Moira sighed, breaking the silence.
“Fine,” she said. She leaned forward and picked up her drink. “To your flesh.”
Moira didn’t give up so easily, that wasn’t her style, and in the morning she called to announce, in a decidedly offhand manner, that she was going to throw a party. “It’s been a while, you know?”
That was the kind of thing Moira did in a crisis. She didn’t say the party would be my last hurrah, my last chance to get laid, to change my mind, but really that’s what she meant by it. I’d been through this with Moira before. This is John, from the camera department. Nick, he’s a gaffer. By then I was practised at polite disinterest, at turning them down in clear terms. I’d never be able to give them what they wanted, a girl who would push them against the wall and slip her tongue in their ear. A girl who jumped into bed and stayed up all night having perfect pink orgasms.
Moira wanted an opportunity to save me from myself, if she could, and I gave in and told her I’d go to the party, at least for a couple hours. It wouldn’t change anything. I was already booked in for my pre-op, I’d done all my bloodwork and tests, passed my psych evaluation with flying colours.
“Of course, this will be the first of this kind of replacement on Canadian soil,” the doctor had said.
We had been sitting in her office sipping green tea from small clay bowls. Her assistant had brought them in. The doctor was behind her desk, blowing on her tea to cool it down. I held my bowl under my chin, lips pursed, blowing, mirroring her serene exterior.
“Oh yes, I heard that,” I said.
“I assisted with one in the Netherlands,” she went on. “It was a young girl, a case very similar to yours. Trauma. Before replacement was an option she was petitioning the state for euthanasia, if you can believe it.”
I could. When I was sixteen I shaved off my eyebrows and walked into traffic. In the hospital the nurse asked me if I was having a nervous breakdown. I think I tried to quote “Lady Lazarus,” but she didn’t get the reference.
The night of the party, I got to Moira’s first, early enough to watch her fret and fuss over the lighting, the mood, arranging and rearranging the chairs along the walls to leave room for dancing, if people wanted to. She kept adding rum to the punch bowl and making me take sips from the crystal ladle, lifting it to my mouth, “Is it better now? How about now?”
Moira threw good parties. She moved in a lot of circles, knew a lot of nubile young things with great shoulders. She worked on film sets downtown, wrangling extras or ushering celebrities from trailer to set.
She did well in that environment. Moira and the men. She worked on big movies. She’d actually seen Leonardo DiCaprio’s butt once. She said it aged him. Nothing from the ’90s is still beautiful.
Moira appreciated ambiance, she understood good and bad vibes. She tuned the dimmer for the kitchen light until it was just right, and the room was cast in a warm, amber glow. We were ready for guests.
And they started to arrive, first some women from Moira’s yoga teaching days, two witchy types with long bell sleeves and their hair wound up in silk scarves. They each kissed Moira on the mouth and then lit up a joint, settled themselves at the kitchen table. Moira poured two cups of rum punch, garnishing them with orange slices. The witches drank and smoked and one of them offered me the joint but I shook my head. Moira topped up my club soda with a disapproving look. It was important that I didn’t get fucked up at parties. Whenever I did, I got prickly, volatile, like a fox caught in a trap. If someone grabbed my arm for support, doubled over and laughing at a joke, I’d scratch their face.
A group of girls trickled in, young things from one of Moira’s weekend groups for running in the park or extreme frisbee. Then some guys arrived with a two-four and at once, as was the case with good parties, the apartment erupted in noise. Moira sank into a chair in the living room and let herself relax, forgetting about me and my problem and the purpose of the party. She took a drag of some guy’s vape and argued jovially with him over a director’s lack of people skills. More people arrived. The yoga witches were stoned and giggling, tearing into bags of saltines they’d excavated from Moira’s cupboards. She never had real food, mostly condiments, tomato soup, and cocktail fixings.
I stayed in the kitchen and shifted myself up to sit on the counter. I could see the whole apartment from there. It was modern, open concept (Moira did well financially, set jobs were lucrative if you could stand the long hours) and for a while I made small talk with people as they passed by, How do you know Moira? Was Leo an asshole on set? en I was alone for a bit too long, surveying the fluid movement of bodies in and out of the kitchen, from the punch bowl to the fridge to the long green velvet couch. In a crowd, bodies moved like liquid. You could be lifted off your feet and carried across a stadium before getting crushed up against a concrete wall. Death by crushing meant suffocation. I couldn’t remember where I’d read that, but it felt important and then it felt dangerous. My vision swam white for a second and I realized I was holding my breath.
I closed my eyes and tried to calm down, tried to remember what the therapist told me to do when my mind played violent tricks on me. I hated the therapist’s office. There weren’t any windows and the furniture was too soft. She made you take off your shoes before you came in. Stay grounded. Root yourself. Feel where your body makes contact with the world around you. That never worked. When I felt my socked feet on the floor or my body against the couch, I panicked. It wasn’t good for me, to be too aware of my body. Because then I’d feel the area. The way it had been looked at. Like a secret I’d been told about, but couldn’t understand. My cousin bent over and leaning down to hold up my skirt. He was much bigger than me. I could see the blond hair on his forearms. Like desert shrubs in miniature, caught in the morning light.
“Hey,” Moira said. I opened my eyes. She was standing in front of me, grinning, her eyes milky and red. She was stoned. “Don’t be alone. Come sit with me.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me off the counter and out of the kitchen. I was grateful for Moira. She was speedy, insistent, pot always made her hyper. She tugged me through the party and the room was a rush of colour and skin. I forgot about my body.
She settled me on the couch beside two people who were deep in conversation. Moira sat in front of us on the floor, legs crossed. Her attention was fixed on the woman.
“This is Mark, Becca,” she rattled off their names and pointed to each face. They looked over at me. Becca smiled and Mark gave a little wave, registering my arrival, before turning back to each other.
“The thing I still don’t get is why people feel like they need it?” Mark said. He was the guy with the vape Moira had been talking to earlier. He was wearing a black ball cap and shorts.
“Well, for me,” Becca said, touching her hand to her chest. “And I can’t speak for other people, but I always knew I wanted it gone.”
They were talking about operations, replacements, like the one I was going to get. I glanced at Moira. She was grinning the way she did when she was excited about meeting someone new. She was crushing on Becca, experiencing the pink gooey distraction I’d never fully known. I’d only seen it in other people.
Becca’s hand moved from her chest to tug the lobe of her right ear, the one facing me on the couch and in the half light of Moira’s mood lighting I could see the ear was a replacement. It was beautiful. The surgeon had done an excellent job. It was soft to her touch, flexible, but a natural shade of very pale green. The kind of green you might see outside in a tree but have a hard time finding anywhere else.
“What material did you choose?” I asked.
“Silicone,” Becca said. She let go of her earlobe. “Silica is biodegradable so it will actually break up with my body. When I die. That’s why I chose it.”
“That’s beautiful,” Moira oozed and touched Becca’s knee. Becca
smiled down at her.
“Thanks.”
“You get to choose the material?” Mark asked from Becca’s other side on the couch.
“Of course,” Becca said. “That’s kind of the whole point. The redefinition.”
“But why your ear?”
“I wanted it gone.”
“So why not a reconstruction? Why not plastic surgery?”
Becca smiled. “You either want it or you don’t. I didn’t want to make do with my ear, I didn’t want a different ear made up from the one I already had. I wanted to cut it off. I didn’t want to feel that ear anymore.”
“She’s getting a replacement too,” Moira said nodding at me.
It took her a slow, stoned second to realize she’d revealed my secret. At first she was looking at Becca and then she was turning to me, her mouth open.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I waved it off, casual.
“You are?” Becca leaned toward me. “You’re getting your ear replaced?”
“No,” I shook my head. “Well yes, I’m getting a replacement. But not my ear. In a couple of weeks.”
“Where?” Mark said, giving me the same horrified look Moira did in the bar, the up and down, calculating my parts, their weight.
“I’d rather not say.” I blushed, and at the same time it occurred to Becca and Mark that my replacement might not be like other ones they’d seen. Not like the sculpted red shoulders and biceps they’d seen in the subway ads. Not like an ear.
“We’re not supposed to ask, anyway,” Becca said, trying to make me feel better. “It’s private.”
She slipped her foot into Moira’s lap, acknowledging Moira’s affection, reciprocating it. You can touch me if you want. Moira picked up the foot like she’d been given something precious to take care of. She stroked it.
“You’re not doing a breast are you?” Mark said.
“It’s private,” Becca repeated.
“It’s not her boobs,” Moira said, forlorn, still stroking Becca’s foot. Nothing could cheer her up on the subject of my replacement.
Mark shook his head at me.
“You’re beautiful, what could you want to cut off?”
For a second, with the three of them staring at me, I wanted to be understood. I wanted to explain, it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the way I’d been born. The problem was how I’d been used, like an instrument bent and played the wrong way, upside down. Surely they could understand?
Mark drained a beer and his Adam’s apple rose and fell, rose and fell. I wanted to pinch it in my fingers and squeeze it until it popped. I’d never felt gooey, but I knew violence, the desire to interfere with the course of another person’s night. Becca steered the conversation expertly to milder topics, a band she’d seen play down at the waterfront the weekend before. Mark watched me. In the end I went home with him. Maybe to prove a point. To who, I wasn’t sure.
“You’re beautiful,” he told me in the dark before he took off my clothes. He touched me like it was his duty to make me a whole person. You might not want to be touched, the trauma therapist said over and over. And that’s okay. The truth was I never minded the touching. I was used to it. With his finger on the button between my legs, he said “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful,” again and again and I thought of a quote I’d read or heard once, but couldn’t remember where. What a waste beauty is, never to be enjoyed. I was never very good at remembering where quotes came from.
I let him fuck me because it was the last time and because fucking, for me, was more like dying anyway. At the end, I got to be reborn. It was like a bad smell in the back of a mouth that could only mean aging, decay, time catching up with skin and spit and sweat. I remembered all the specifics of being a child, smashing Barbies together naked, their stiff arms extended out like they yearned to bend, to flex and become soft. I remembered the promise of a surprise I’d get later, after school, if I was a good girl. And if I wasn’t, the threat of a broom handle, put inside a place, a hole inside me that I didn’t even know existed. Then, the urgent touch and how it froze me, stopped everything silent, and how colour and sound didn’t make sense anymore. How could the ceiling over the bed be purple? It had always been white.
When Mark was finished and it was over, I got to be alive again. And I imagined the instrument between my legs melting into something that couldn’t feel. Something flat, smooth, and simple. Something I got to put down and forget about. Something plastic.
Christine Ottoni writes and lives in Toronto. She is a candidate at the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her debut short story collection, Cracker Jacks for Misfits, came out with Exile Editions in the Fall of 2019. Her website is christineottoni.com.