Her friends said her standards were too high, but she never lowered them. She did not want to stoop to conquer. She wanted a man she could consider at least equal to herself, and possibly superior.
It really seemed that all the good ones were married or gay, and here she was thirty three years old and beginning to fade and not a decent prospect in sight. She began to have regrets. The professor. The General. Both idiots but not that bad. The local TV news anchor forever peering at himself in mirrors and listening to his answering machine when she was in the bathroom. Yuck.
It was sad that she died so young.
Her parents hadn't even retired yet and their beloved child was gone. Her body went to the big warehouse which contracted corpse preparation with all the funeral homes. A man named Bob pulled her off the line.
Most of the bodies he got were old and horrible. He thought of them as human shells and treated them as such. But this body was perfect. He fell in love. Not with the dead body but with the human being who had inhabited it. He set himself to remembering every perfect square inch of her. Each finger and toe nail, ears, navel, knuckles and knees - oh yes, and all those other places. Any lustful impulse he swiftly repressed. Such things make the newspapers.
He went to her funeral. Everyone said how beautiful she looked.
``Were you a friend of hers?'' a young woman asked.
``Hardly,'' he answered, ``I'm in the mortuary industry. I just thought she was so beautiful. I wish I'd known her.''
The woman laughed.
``She had very high standards.'' she said.