Riddle by the Deep End

The thunderstorm broke just as Marcus poured his second glass of cheap merlot, the sky fracturing into lightning that illuminated our plastic furniture like paparazzi flashbulbs. We sat by the pool—the stagnant, neglected thing that had become a monument to our mutual neglect—watching the rain create concentric circles on its surface. I remembered how I'd tried to make dinner that night, wilted spinach turning to slime in the pan while he checked his phone for messages that weren't from me.

"You're like the sphinx," I said, the wine loosening my tongue. "All riddles and silence, sitting on your pedestal of unspoken grievances."

He didn't laugh. He didn't even look at me. His cat, Oracle, wound around his legs, purring like a small engine of misplaced devotion.

"Is there an answer?" I asked, and my voice cracked. "To the riddle, I mean. Or have you forgotten the question too?"

The lightning flashed again, catching the hollows under his eyes. We'd been married seven years, long enough for the mystery to curdle into something else—resentment, maybe, or simply exhaustion. I thought about the spinach again, how I'd wanted to cook something healthy, something nourishing, how it had seemed symbolic at the time. Love decaying into compost.

"The answer," Marcus said finally, setting down his glass, "is that we already asked the riddle three years ago. We just didn't want to hear the answer."

Oracle jumped onto his lap, and he stroked her fur mechanically, as if performing a ritual he'd lost faith in. The rain intensified, blurring the line between pool and patio, between what was submerged and what was merely drowned.

"So what now?" I asked. "Do we keep sitting by this pool that neither of us has bothered to clean, watching it fill up with rain, pretending it's still swimmable?"

Marcus looked at me then, really looked at me, and for a moment I saw something like grief or maybe recognition.

"We drain it," he said. "We finally drain the damn thing."

The cat purred on, indifferent to human epiphanies, as the storm swallowed whatever else might have been said.