Cotton Candy Beard

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.

As fates go, it was not a bad one. Her parents, of course, were beside themselves with worry. The knot Grandpa had tied was too tight to untie, and everyone who tried uncoiling the navel of rubber sent violent thrums throughout the balloon, shivering Isadora’s frame. No one could bring themselves to pop the balloon, for fear of accidentally puncturing her. Besides which, Isadora loved it. In her stocking feet, she found she could slide around and around the perimeter of the balloon, and up and over and back again. If she struck her feet against the base of the balloon quickly and frequently like a match against flint, she could generate enough static electricity to amble casually up the side until she was hanging from the top, her auburn hair hanging out from her like tree roots. And everything had an orangeish glow about it; it was like living inside a sunset.

Sure, at times there were minor threats, such as when a bee alighted on the side of the balloon, filling the inside with dread and an echoing hum. But in general, it was about the safest environment imaginable.

Living inside such a round and fragile environment meant that Isadora needed to comport herself with as little edge and as much care as possible. This wasn’t difficult, as she had always been a soft and considerate person. That was how her parents and grandparents had raised her, and how they presented themselves to her whenever possible. But she was young, and with age came the jagged sharpness of cynicism.

She watched, as time passed, her sister grow taller, more angular and awkward like a poorly assembled bookshelf, and then slowly the edges were worn down and the lines filled in, and she became a beautiful woman. She watched, with bittersweet awe the passage of time slough its skin as her parents danced on their 25th anniversary. She was alone, aloft, entombed. She hadn’t grown an inch since she first crawled into the balloon, and the toll this stasis took on her heart was unbearable.

Then it came to pass that she began to shrink. Surprisingly, the bright orange balloon, in all this time, had remained bright, orange and as round and inflated as on that fateful day. Balloons normally slowly shrivel, wrinkle and wince under the pressures of time and gravity. This balloon had endured somehow; remaining in constant stasis as it appeared was the case with Isadora. But on the inside, Isadora was shriveling, wrinkling and wincing under the pressures of time and the slow erosion of emotion. Indifference had settled like sediment in her center and eaten away her core until there was little left but air. Unlike her balloon, this air was heavy, and far from warm. It contracted slowly, whispering from her body, taking traces of Isadora with it as it fell away.