Riddle Without an Answer

Ethan sat in the vinyl chair, watching the dormant television mounted to the wall. The coaxial cable had been severed months ago—some renovation accident, never repaired—and now the screen displayed only its own blank reflection. He saw himself in the dark glass: thinning hair, eyes that hadn't slept properly in three years, the weary face of a man who'd stopped recognizing himself somewhere along the way.

Julia lay on the examination table behind the curtain, her feet in stirrups. Again. Their sixth attempt. Ethan had memorized the pattern of ceiling tiles so thoroughly he could recite their arrangement from memory. He'd stopped going in there with her. Two cycles ago, after the doctor announced another negative result, Julia had asked him to wait outside. "I need to do this part alone," she'd said, not meeting his eyes. He'd agreed, though the request had cut deeper than the procedure itself.

The fertility clinic was a strange limbo space—neither hospital nor hotel, filled with women like Julia, their husbands like him, all swimming upstream against biology's brutal current. Ethan understood the ancient Greeks better now. Why they invented myths to explain suffering. The sphinx's riddle made a certain kind of sense: What walks on four legs, then two, then three? A human life distilled to its tragic trajectory. The answer hadn't saved Oedipus in the end. Knowledge rarely did.

Julia emerged from behind the curtain, pulling her shirt down. She didn't look at him.

"Dr. Chen says we can try again in six weeks," she said, voice flat.

"Julia—"

"Don't, Ethan. Just don't."

"I was thinking," he said, though the words felt like stones in his mouth. "Maybe we could stop. Maybe that's the answer."

She turned to him then, and he saw it all—the exhaustion, the grief, the terrifying clarity that had been growing between them like a tumor. "The answer to what? The riddle?" She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "There is no answer, Ethan. That's the thing everyone forgets about the sphinx. Sometimes you just get eaten alive."

Later, in the car, she asked him to take the long way home. They drove in silence past the closed businesses, past the construction site where a mechanical bull——some kind of promotional installation for a western bar—loomed in the darkness, its metal head frozen mid-buck. Julia watched it pass, then turned back to the window, her hand moving to her stomach in a gesture so reflexive she probably didn't know she was doing it anymore.

Ethan kept driving. He knew the long way home too well by now.