From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Katita
Katita is one of the two protagonists of Beach Surgery. She presents as a hybrid of nurse and sword-bearing assassin: a first-aid kit on her belt, a bastardised samurai sword across her back, a flak jacket dusted with red desert sand, thigh-high socks and red kitten heels. Red is her master motif — her hair, the cross on her kit, possibly blood wiped across her face.[1]
She does not smile for the entire story until one of the final scenes. Cold, strategic and grief-stricken, she is the agent of the cycle: she is trying to break it — to make the spinning of the world reverse. She can hear the sound of the earth rubbing against space, which sickens her.
Method
Leif's devotion to Katita is, by her own reckoning, a love she has "fashioned in the most surgically strategic of ways" — the phrase is the narrator's free-indirect rendering of Katita's thought, not her spoken words.
Katita: There is one side to a coin, and it goes the whole way around. And around. And around we go.— widely cited as her thesis statement
She is derived by C. W. Smith from his memory of the redhead medical intern he married; the name is synthesised from the fox ears his wife wore the night they met.
Appearances across the C. W. Smith oeuvre
Katita is a recurring character across C. W. Smith's works — one of the "instruments of return." Besides Beach Surgery she appears in Saltando (the baths meeting), Leaving/Leading (a first date, dissolving into Newcastle as a boat), Summer Endzone (the radio downhill after a pirate station), A Billiard Table with Five Balls and Twelve Cues (the academic's wife on a Shanbudia island), Pugil (a sleepless writer who watches Leif fight — renamed Adria in the standalone version), Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time (the community's property manager), Their Most August Public Organ (building the archive), and — alone, as the narrator's wife and a biologist — Garden Monologue.
See also
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. A Complicated Surgery…, 2020.