Tiresias slept in until 10:14am, just like he knew she would. He navigated blindly to the bathroom to shave her morning stubble and insert fresh tampon. The plastic applicator laid (as the gods would consider it a gift of life) auspiciously atop a nest of kleenex and pubic hair in the wastebasket. He grimaced at the heavens, just like she knew he would.
One lifetime, what he began with; times seven lifetimes, trampling two amorous snakes outside Athens; minus ninety years, beheading Louis the XVI's pug; divided by three lifetimes, conscripting a golden ass for hard labor during the 1849 Gold Rush; times two lifetimes, feeding the bicycle-riding bear at the Leningrad circus; plus twenty-seven years, buying the singing trout in the bric-a-brac aisle; and so on.
His lifetimes fluctuated wildly beyond her accurate count: a divination from terrible lizard bones, plus one-hundred twenty years; nurtured emerald plants without water or sun or soil, times two lifetimes; a televised words from horse who spoke as a man, divided by twelve lifetimes. Not just his lifetimes, but her gender, too. He, she, he, she, he -- every time a god suspected hubris.
He had the receipts worked out somewhere in her hovel, mostly chickenscratch and erasure skids. All he knew were things were getting worse. Her gut told him she was going to be alive for a long, long time.
Augury had changed. He listened for caws or quacks as he flipped blindly through the more fruitful programming: nature, pet care, historical aviation, sometimes documentaries, sometimes cartoons. She just needed any tweet that sounded like a word from the heavens. Somewhere there hid a prophecy to restore him to the simple and singular lifetime she always wanted.
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