Questions Left Behind

The hotel pool glowed with that artificial turquoise light that exists nowhere in nature. Elena sat at the edge, legs submerged in water that felt too warm, too chemical, like everything else in her forty-third year.

She'd told Michael she was at a spa weekend. The truth was more pathetic: she'd driven three hours to check into a middling business hotel, alone, just to remember what silence sounded like that wasn't weighted by his expectations, their mortgage, the relentless forward momentum of a life that had somehow ceased to belong to her.

Her hair—once thick, now thinning exactly as her mother's had at this age—was plastered to her forehead. She smoothed it back, a gesture that felt mechanical, repeated a thousand times. What else had she done on autopilot? The last five years rose like fog: dinner parties where she'd laughed at jokes she didn't find funny, sex that was more chore than passion, the slow erosion of everything she'd thought she'd become.

She was a zombie, she realized. Not the movie kind—she ate brains, she didn't eat them—but the walking dead nonetheless. Moving through days that blurred into each other, hungry without knowing what for.

A cat appeared at the pool's edge, gaunt and orange, watching her with ancient, judgmental eyes. It reminded her of the sphinx she'd seen in Egypt during that trip before the marriage solidified into this thing that held her. The sphinx had asked riddles, but her life asked none. It just took and took.

"What do you want?" she asked the cat.

It blinked slowly, then turned away. Typical.

Her phone buzzed on the chair. Michael, probably. Checking in. Asking what she wanted for dinner. Meaningful questions had no place in their marriage anymore.

Elena stood up, water dripping from her thighs, cold now in the desert air. The sphinx had been destroyed long before she ever saw it—nose gone, face worn smooth by winds and time and people who wanted what it guarded. But it was still there. Still asking.

She picked up her phone, stared at the lock screen, and pressed and held the power button. Power off.

The cat watched her from the shadows as she walked toward the hotel, leaving her phone on the chair. Some riddles required silence to answer.