Isadora believed her name was prettier than she was. The perfect constellation of consonants and vowels, the name twirled, danced across the tongue. The name conjured up images of lithe, willowy gazelles of women moving slightly but assuredly through space.
In contrast, Isadora saw a squat, cumbersome presence in her mirror. She dreamed of having long black hair, cascading down her shoulders framing a thin, white mask of a face with miniscule features. But her hair cartwheeled away from her head in all directions, brown the shade of the not-quite wood of elementary school desktops. Her face was plain aside from the rude invasion of a walnut-shaped nose in its center.
Far from a gazelle, when Isadora first thought of the animal she most resembled, she conjured up a clam, taking her name literally. Clams, with their hinged shell bodies, are like living doors, she thought. But when she finally glimpsed the inside of a clam, the pink, mucousy slug-like creature within the door, she changed her mind. But she could never think up a different animal, and deep down, she knew that was what she looked like on the inside, too.
Whatever possessed her parents to name her Isadora she did not know. But her gut instinct was that if they knew what she was going to look like they would have labeled her more appropriately. She didn’t deserve such an intricately beautiful name; her plainness demanded a more ugly word, like Marge or Fran, names that tasted like bile and smelled of overcooked carrots.
Isadora was named after a dancer, and as such, was encouraged at an early age to take dancing lessons. The other girls, practically silhouettes in their black leotards and skeletal frames, conformed into one glorious creature, a panther. They moved in concert with one another, in steps so minute that audiences barely noticed them. Isadora tried to mimic their dancing but her body lacked the aerodynamics of her peers. She crouched behind the others like a prey animal, and tried to look inconspicuous.
When she was in her twenties, she fell in love with a lantern-jawed man ten years her senior with a strong name like Troy, who didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, but kept it in his breast pocket, peeking out slightly over the horizon line like a handkerchief. One night, he took it out and inflated it with a bicycle pump, until it was fully inflated, purple as a bruise and glistening in the moonlight like a miniature gothic cathedral. He invited her to explore its chambers, and she slipped off her sneakers and carefully stepped inside.
Inside the heart was like a cavern, full of shadows and stalactite. There was a cold dampness without water, a sense of slipperiness on the rough surfaces. And there was a vast vacancy. When Isadora sneezed from the chill, the sound reverberated throughout the heart and vibrated the chambers, as if to rudely mimic the reverberations of the air through her nostrils.
The rude sputtering which buzzed throughout the heart was not an echo, though. It was the sound of deflation, a noise Isadora surmised too late. She had strayed too far from the heart’s entrance, and could not find her way out through the labyrinthine series of ventricles and atria in time. The structure collapsed around her, and she knew there was no fighting it. So she laid down in the fourth chamber and let the walls fall over her, swallowed as if by a giant snake.
The coroner’s report read simply: “If that ain’t a metaphor, I don’t know what is.”
Tags: Isadora
Mark J. Hansen
