Kitchen Sphinx

Elena sat at the marble island, the slice of papaya on her plate glistening like something forbidden. Across from her, Marcus methodically arranged his vitamin supplements — C, D3, zinc, omega-3 — in a neat military formation. Their marriage had become like this breakfast: precise, fortified, and utterly silent.

"You're staring again," Marcus said, not looking up.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

She wanted to say: About how you've become a sphinx these past months, inscrutable and monumentally absent even when you're in the room. About how I bear the weight of unsaid words until my ribs ache. About how Sarah called yesterday, my oldest friend, and I couldn't bring myself to answer.

"The papaya's sweet," Elena said instead.

Marcus nodded, swallowing his vitamins with practiced efficiency. He'd started the regimen after his father's heart attack last spring. Now he swallowed them like communion wafers, as if they might somehow consecrate this hollow thing they'd made of their life together.

"Remember papaya salad in Thailand?" she tried. "That beach, the night we drank ourselves sick on Chang beer?"

"We had a presentation the next morning, Elena."

"We were alive, Marcus."

He finally looked at her, and she saw it then — not sphinx-like mystery at all, but something far more ordinary and therefore devastating. He wasn't guarding some secret riddle. He was simply no longer curious enough to ask.

"I'm going to Sarah's," Elena said, standing up. The papaya sat uneaten on her plate, a fist of bright possibility in the gray morning.

"For how long?"

She thought about vitamins and preventive care and all the ways you could try to fortify something that was already decaying from the inside.

"I don't know," she said, and for the first time in months, it wasn't a lie.