At the End of the Ninth Year

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«Well,» said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, «here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.»

Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. «What?»

«I said,» said Sheila, «the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore.»

Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:

«Not married?»

«No, that was another time, another body, another me.» She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.

«Hold on!» He took a stiff jolt of coffee. «Explain.»

«Well, dear Thomas, don't you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule―»

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