Charlene exhaled noisily as she willed her flexors and extensors to move her hand toward her face. She imagined her biceps also aiding that effort. While the replacement dowel pin joint, which anchored together the matron’s forearm and lower arm, prevented her from further wasting away, it also limited her ergonomics.

Whereas Charlene’s organic connectors had slowly decayed from decades of her synovial fluid washing against her cartilage, her corrosion-resistant, inorganic parts had proved themselves to be synarthrosic. Worse, few of her friends cared about her increasing restricted mobility. Those associates were usually otherwise occupied celebrating that academic’s career successes.

A short time ago, for instance, her department had held a luncheon to fete Charlene on Cambridge University Press’s publication of her Treaties on Dio Chrysostom’s Orations and on The University of Chicago Press’s declaration that it would print her Social Construction in Zenobius’ Proverbs. At that august entertainment, the professor had been unable to grasp the ordinary utensils that the caterers had provided. While observing her junior colleagues and department chair knock back rare roast beef and virtual mashed potatoes, she had allowed herself the luxury of a few sighs; she occasionally paid tribute to the days when she had been entirely made of flesh.

In fairness, despite the fact that the members of her mentor’s faction had questioned Charlene’s decision concerning her physical remediation, the scholar had gone ahead, anyway, and had exchanged her diothrosic chunks for bits made from titanium and rubber. Afterward, when that research exemplar, as well as the generation that succeeded him, had become as physically obsolete as were the ancient philosophers to whom the group of them paid professional homage, the intellectual awarded herself fresh credence for the way in which she had chosen among available physiologies.

Only much later, Charlene bungee jumped off her intellectual cliff.  Specifically, in the decade that followed the death of so many of her peers and advisers, she took on the electronic persona of a part-time retail employee from Iowa City , Iowa . Under that guise, the researcher began assembling and submitting writings based on all of the wiggly images that burrowed through her brain when she was supposed to be lecturing on western civilization’s cultural history.

Although Charlene developed a forte in both horror flash fiction and in lipstick poetry, she was not at all displeased when Analog Science Fiction and Fact made known that it was going public with her “Eyes of the Uromastyx,” and whenPloughshares advertised that her sonnet, “Georgie’s Pudding,” was going to appear in a future volume. To commemorate those successes, she scheduled additional innovative surgeries. Charlene had deemed it timely to replace her vertebral articulations with more reliable segments.

While Charlene healed from those invasive cuts, she penned “Ramos’ Salvation.” Straight away, that piece, too, was accepted for publication. The editors at Glimmer Train had exclaimed, in their acknowledgment email, that her exposition was so original as to bring to mind the genre of prose created by the AI Effect software, which was currently in vogue at select universities’ writing workshops.

Unfortunately, all of that literary bare branching did not bring Charlene further academic accolades. In the place of such honors, the university lecturer’s most topical placements had introduced, into her life, an interpersonal dilemma. The Iowa City Press Citizen had caught wind that a “local resident” was being extolled for pioneering poetics. A correspondent, from that weekly, had been tenaciously harrying Charlene, hourly interrupting her thoughts, with instant messaging.

To stop his harassment, the elitist was willing to break her façade, to let the news hound know: that she believed her counterfeited experiences to be a justified means to the agreeable end of her appearing more user-friendly in print, that a piece of her chicanery had consisted of her daughter photographing her in borrowed glasses and a wig, and that she had enlisted the help of her son in fabricating a verbal portrait that accounted, in the language of serial divorces and bad hair days, for her decades’ worth of living.

Charlene was hesitant, nevertheless, about making the acquaintance of that reporter.

Even if his publisher was willing to fly him to Princeton for the “scoop of the year,” She believed that their meeting would be ill-fated, since she had already experienced too many encounters with pediophobic people.

Just four neat months ago, Charlene had been subjected to repulsion from a collaborator employed in Brisbane . That fellow, the recipient of a University of Queensland travel grant, had been so intent upon working with the instructor face-to-face, to further their joint efforts on “The Probable Elocution of Judicial Oratory in the Fourth Century,” that he had transversed the globe to meet her. Unfortunately, that professor’s eyes had bulged and his limbs had begun to tremble long before the achiever could even respond to his preliminary salutation. As soon as he said “hello,” Charlene’s distinguished visitor had clutched his abdomen and had raced to the green that was adjacent to Princeton’s East Pyne Building . He didn’t quite make it, though. Instead, he had found himself spewing vomit along the Classics Department’s sacrosanct halls.

There had been other moments, as well, when Charlene second guessed her sham. One such incident occurred when she presented “Gorgias’ Ego” at an annual meeting of the American Branch of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. On that occasion, two colleagues had been carried out of the auditorium with chest pain, and six had complained of feeling dizzy. C harlene’s only surviving graduate school friend, Ryan Wallaby, mentioned that he had become ill with a chocking sensation.

As she contemplated such events, Charlene looked at her reflection in the panes of lead glass that insulated her office. Beyond her window, the bare boughs of a sickly elm tree beguiled the eye into seeking out complimentary life forms. Albeit, no chipmunks or squirrels investigated that gargantuan’s immense vertical furrows; no creature was interested in finding out more about the lines that alluded to that tree’s formerly expanding rings. No tourists sat near its roots. No graffiti defaced its bark. A pair of sneakers, a torn plastic bag, and a tattered hair ribbon constituted that mammoth’s sole ornaments.

Charlene shook her head. She had been morally contented with her ruse. Originally, she had meant only to compose and to broadcast. It was not until her piece, “Lice in Love,” had been nominated for a Hugo that she realized a natural lifespan would adversely constrain her creative output. Yet, Charlene maintained that she had not been greedy when she deigned to use her royalties, from the 7^th edition of that limitedly popular freshman text, Humanities for You and Me, to fund her initial elective surgery.

The doctors at the University Medical Center at Princeton had excitedly gobbled up Charlene’s monies, rationalizing that since her maternal grandmother had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, they were merciful in supplying their client with preventive care. In the same way in which those surgeons regularly excised the breasts of healthy women with family histories of cancer, and in which they performed episiotomies on young mothers with no skin elasticity issues, those practitioners readily replaced Charlene’s sacroiliac joints with proxies.

At the time, the Classic Department’s Tenure and Promotion Committee had been so delighted with Charlene’s participation in the anthropology dimension of the Fulbright Specialist Program and with her nomination to second vice president of the National Communication Association, that they were willing to look the other way on cosmetic matters. Her contiguous articles in Philosophy and Rhetoric and inTraditio helped her cause, as well.

So, Charlene, under her alias, wrote even more creative nonfiction for The Smithsonian and for The Christian Science Monitor. Under her nom de plume, she similarly fashioned further tales of vampires and of golems for The House of Painand for City Morgue. She dashed off intermittent book reviews for Jane Magazine,too.

At present, if Charlene’s exaggerated posture, as a tenured professor in an Ivy League school, gleaned less loathing, then all of the variations of her play-acting would have been as sweet as had been Socrates’ final drink when that great scholar had been confronted by the Sophists. Regrettably, the contemporary state of the academic community’s vagarities disallowed for undefendable fakery. Charlene called to cancel the interview.