Riddle of the Walking Dead

The bar was the kind of place where hope came to die slowly, over cheap whiskey and cheaper conversation. Elena sat across from Marcus, watching his hands trace the lines on her palm like he was reading a map to somewhere he'd already been.

"You're going to leave me," he said, not a question but a statement worn smooth from repetition.

The bartender, a guy named Tom who'd become something like a friend in the six months since Elena started coming here, set down another round. His golden retriever sat behind the bar, chin on paws, watching the room with eyes that had seen too many drunk philosophers.

"We're already gone, Marc." Elena signaled Tom for the check. "We've been gone for months. We're just..." She searched for the word. "Zombies."

"Zombies of what?" Marcus laughed bitterly. "Of love? Of us?"

"Of whatever we thought this was."

Outside, the city hummed with that particular 2 AM restlessness. A sphinx moth fluttered near the streetlamp, drawn to the light like all the other doomed things. Elena thought about the riddle she'd been asking herself for months: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in evening? The answer was man, but her version was different. What burns with passion at twenty, simmers with compromise at thirty, and becomes something unrecognizable by forty?

She'd thought Marcus was the answer once. Now he was just another question without a satisfying resolution.

"The sphinx ate the wrong person," Elena said finally. "That's why Oedipus could answer the riddle. Because the sphinx had already consumed someone else's truth."

Marcus stared at her. "You're not making sense."

"I never have." She stood up, leaving money on the counter. "That's the problem. I've been speaking a language you stopped listening to months ago."

The dog behind the bar let out a soft whine. Tom nodded at her, a small acknowledgment. Some endings were quieter than others.

"So that's it?" Marcus asked.

"That was it three months ago." Elena walked out into the night, leaving him to solve the riddle alone.