The Process of Becoming a Noncorporeal Entity

by Channie Greenberg

Jason had not minded the bedclothes. As the least cantankerous of the frat boys, he often succeeded in getting his paws on “fluff and other good stuff.” Although he failed at cleanup duty, his sheets remaining covered in sticky goop, he, nonetheless, remembered to buy sawdust for his floor.

Some of his and Beth’s most sensuous moments had been spent in his rumpled bed, he wearing his old blue, cotton pajamas and Beth, her flannel gown. Jason would put his bear-like arms around Beth and would kiss her eyelids until she awoke. She responded in kind, reaching sleepily for his bewhiskered face.

One time, though, after they had begun to touch each other, Jason had stopped suddenly and had asked Beth why she bothered joining him. On the one hand, she readily leant him her skin. On the other, she insisted that because she was merely a high-school freshman, her coital yard was off limits.

Beth gasped. Her supervising committee, the girls in her geometry class, had suggested that certain players were doping or were, for other good reasons, dopey. It was difficult for the teen to conceive of Jason, though, as other than her eternally linked lover. It must be those loose, gritty particles of sleep which were making her prince protest the undergirding principles of their relationship.

After all, it was written in all adolescent females’ minds that men were fidel, that men were noble and that men were iron-like. Nonetheless, Jason, an actual college fellow, was literally crying over something as small as the lack, from Beth, of a single expression of intimacy.

Amanda, who was taking Advanced Placement Psychology, would later explain that confounding behavior to Beth. In the interim, Jason’s would-be paramour pushed him away, but not before grabbing his arm in a twisting manner and then scratching his face. All girls know that dedication ought never to be questioned among partners.

For some reason, later that day, Jason broke up with Beth. He immediately took up with Brenda, Beth’s neighbor. Brenda was a high school sophomore reputed to be willing to hook up with anything more temperate than a corpse. When Brenda bit or clawed, there was more pleasure than pain.

Thereafter, multiple times an hour, Beth dialed a health club, a women’s support group, and the weather channel. Beth was coached to spend her discretionary time lifting free weights. Whereas she used to count the spaces between her beau’s calls, she began to spy on Jason’s goings and comings on Facebook. Whereas she used to save each of Jason’s emails, she began to amass Tough Tigerettes’ electronic bulletins. Those pseudo-warrior articles barely satisfied the young woman.

From those pages, Beth nonetheless learned that becoming doughty meant forging tantrums, joining a debate team, contending in discus and associating with the physics club. She also researched employment at select, sinister, chemical facilities and signed on to save the whales.

After high school, Beth majored in criminal justice. Thereafter, she acquired a federal firearms license and began to coach intercollegiate gymnastics. Subsequently, she pursued a graduate degree in biophysics. She took up archery, too, excelling at clout and gaining a reputation for her use of the compound bow. For a few years, Jason, who had moved to a far away university, for his doctorate, stayed below Beth’s radar.

Such precious inconspicuousness evaporated, however, when the smart fellow, who sorted mail at Beth’s new school, handed her an envelope forwarded from post office to post office, since her early high school days. Her old prickly hurt once more rebounding, Beth developed interest in researching the cloning of Komodo Dragons.

The young scientist, though, remained stymied by her studies; the beasts kept eating her assistants. Despite those and similar scholarly conundrums, Beth eventually received a Ph.D. She went to work in her city’s Bureau of Homeland Defense.

Beyond the many job offers floated to Dr. Laiser, suitors, too, plied her with amazing proposals. Beth rebuffed all but her tantra yoga partner, a youth who was multilingual as well as was an expert with Rung Paisarn RPS-001s and Madsen LARs.

Installed in her new lab, the fair scientist added her cerebral prowess to the defense of the nation, devoted much time to raising flap-footed lizards and their kin and studied obnu bilate. Time passed. Beth developed a liking for capers packed in coarse salt and a romantic allergy to her yoga friend.

She began to purchase the flower buds by the case. She packed up all of her flexible lover’s belongings and threw them out of her apartment. Thus nourished and freed, Beth was able to devote additional hours to bestial hybridization. At last, she developed a pseudo-griffin worthy of displaying in the local fair’s exotic pet category.

Dr. Laiser competed in the tractor pull, too, having tweaked a rider mower such that it was drawn by a pair of dragons. As Beth and her team approached the finish line, she saw Jason. Beth smiled.

A sprightly redhead was whispering in his ear, stroking his cheek, blushing, giggling, and pushing his wheelchair. Beth had heard about the accident, a practiced fist that had met the top of Jason’s neck after Jason had trysted with a bookmaker’s lady.

When her meet was over, Beth approached the couple and introduced herself. Her sweat-shellacked muscles and honed intelligence were nothing in the face of her adolescent memories. Jason had known many Brendas, but had never returned to his first object of affection, regrets letter notwithstanding.

After complimenting the ginger-haired woman on her ensemble, Beth offered her hungry, blue ribbon pet to her former lover. She suggested that such creatures, when correctly dissected, were reservoirs of neurological healing.

Thereafter, the lady of science pulled a small sapling out of the earth and picked her teeth with it. As she walked past the competition yard, out the fairground’s gate, she laughed. Witnesses claim that she even skipped a little.