Tiresias

Among the dead he’s the only one upright. Where every other shade pushes forward for the blood, mindless and starving, Tiresias parts the crowd with a golden staff and waits to be invited. He drinks first because that is the rule. When he raises his head with his lips and beard dark, he speaks in fragments Odysseus does not yet understand. A god’s hatred that will follow you home. Sacred cows that must not be touched. All who do so will die. You will return alone, late, broken, on a stranger’s ship. You will find your house full of uninvited guests, and you will end them. Every line lands. The cattle warning gets ignored and the men die for it. The homecoming arrives exactly as he said. [SPOILER: The hall is cleared with the bow and the arrows just as the prophecy named, and the suitors die without time to call out. The strangest instruction is the last: once the blood is washed from your home, carry an oar inland until you meet a man who calls it a winnowing fan. Plant it there. Make peace with Poseidon. Then you will be free. The retelling never shows that final task. It hangs in the air after the bed-recognition like an unfinished sentence, the one piece of the prophecy still unredeemed.]