2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

of his body so he could be limber and alert, satisfied throughout the day.
In return, the soldier loved Isadore gently, never spoke cruelly to her,
gave her a boy who looked just like him and loved the boy gently too.
He died during a war and their son died during a war and the loss of
them was not something she bore lightly. The grief made her hard and
cold and but not unhappy.
The men did not understand Isadore. They did not know her. They
thought, when she held them in her slender arms, when she took them
between her muscled thighs or in the humid softness of her mouth, that
there was a part of the whore that loved them. She did not love them,
nor did she hate them. She was indifferent. She felt nothing for men at
all. Isadore was ageless, enjoyed by fathers and sons and grandsons alike.
Her skin was dark as was her hair. She had ample hips, a soft belly, and
breasts that often brought men to their knees when they entered her
chambers. She lived on the top floor of the tallest stone building in the
Flesh District in a series of open rooms separated only by long, sheer
cloths that changed the configuration of space when they swayed as a
breeze passed through. The moans of the men who enjoyed Isadore’s bed
could be heard as far away as the edge of the known world. She was always
handsomely rewarded. When the sun rose and the men returned to
their labors and their families, Isadore would bathe in a deep ceramic
basin filled with cold water. The cold made her feel clean.
When men brought Isadore brightly polished stones, she wove them
into a beautiful necklace she always wore, whether she was bathing or
bedding or walking through the Flesh District, looking in on the
women who would never be wives, tending to the broken hands of the
wives who would never be the women their husbands loved. As the
necklace grew, she had to wrap it around her arm, or drape the length of
stones over her shoulder or pull it behind her, letting it gather dust. The
weight of the necklace made her gait something to behold. Her every
movement was slow, measured. Isadore felt the weight of stones in her
spine and the soles of her feet, a dull ache that never went away. Sometimes,
Isadore fingered these stones and sucked them clean and thought
of her husband who died in a war, leaving her in the city to carry a
length of heavy stone. He had not been handsome man but his back
was strong. When she and her soldier made love, Isadore splayed her
82 Santa Fe Literary Review