I’d memorized the smell of burning plastic, even years before the accident. 

My older brother David, as sweet as he’s been these past few months, had a mean streak growing up. They say the three telltale signs of a serial killer in youth are wetting the bed, hurting animals, and starting fires – if you count my dolls as animals, he fit all three. In our tiny house, nothing of mine could escape his grasp. And most anything he touched would soon burst into flame.

Were he like most boys, he might have ripped my dolls’ arms off, cut their hair, even burn them with a magnifying glass if he had one. But David went a step further: while I rolled in the dirt outside, he’d grab my Barbies, place them in a foil-lined baking pan, and shove them into a 500º oven. He kept our oven mitts on top of the fridge. Mom spent most days working, leaving David in charge, and me to watch the inferno through the oven window.

Left in an oven to die, a Barbie doll goes through a speedy metamorphosis. First, her hair burns away. Second, her dress catches fire. Third, her skull collapses in on itself like a crushed can. After that, she quickly melts into a shiny puddle of pink-black goop. A chemical mess that not even Ken could learn to love.

Once they’d transformed into a pile of plastic goop, David would take them out to cool. Sometimes he would let me watch as they sat out on the countertop, oozing and smoking and probably poisoning us both. Other times he’d take them away and leave the dried carcasses for me to find under my pillow.

I swear, he really is a sweetheart nowadays.

Either way, David’s fun left me with a Dream House full of burn ward patients. All that remained of Barbie, Skipper, Midge, were crusty remnants: cracked, bald skulls; crooked arms; flat plates of melted-and-dried plastic for legs. Any beauty they once possessed had been torn away, leaving me with miniature freaks.

I knew the feeling. Since kindergarten, I’d become known in our small town as a freak myself: deemed “too boyish” by the girls for my short hair and dirt-caked skin, yet rejected by the boys for playing with dolls. Even in third grade, nearly an adult for Chrissake, I still heard the whispers about me as I cartwheeled alone on the playground. “Weirdo,” they said. “Loser.”

It didn’t help matters once I started bringing my disfigured dolls to school to play with. Compared to my classmates’ American Girls and My Little Ponies, mine might as well have been cockroaches.

And it was because of that that I came to appreciate my melted dolls. They didn’t choose to be this way, to be cursed with freakishness by some vengeful god. They weren’t ruined. A Barbie is still Barbie, even if she’s naked, missing her face, and most of her limbs.

There’s a beauty in that uniqueness. Warped pink-red-black skin, chest turned into a hard plate. Anyone can own a Barbie; only I owned this one, burned in this certain way in that specific oven. Still lovely, still that amazing woman that could be a doctor, pilot, and princess all within the same day. This was just a new stage in life.

It took me a while to remember that when, seventeen years later, I crashed my motorcycle while speeding at night. Wearing just a light jacket, I hit the pavement fast enough to rip most of the flesh from my lower arm. I lay in my own bloody puddle, wheezing in the smell of burning plastic, for twenty minutes before the ambulance picked me up. I lost the arm the next day.




Nobody looks at me the same way anymore – much less myself. I spent my two weeks in the hospital staring at the bandages, thinking about what I used to have. Who am I now? Something fragile, broken?

Something about losing an arm that no one ever tells you is how many insurance forms you have to sign. Since being discharged, I’ve been writing my name way more than usual. It's a therapeutic reminder: I’m me, no matter what I lose. Me, with buzzed hair, dark freckles, lopsided breasts, one arm.

I'm not ruined. This is just a new stage in life. There's beauty in my uniqueness, even if I'm the only one who sees it.