Riddles at the Bottom

The pool hadn't been drained in years. Green algae scum coated the surface like a bruised membrane, and somewhere beneath, something moved with sluggish purpose.

"You remember, don't you?" Elena said from the patio chair behind me. She was smoking again, something she'd sworn she'd quit after her father died. "What happened here."

I turned to face my oldest friend, really seeing her for the first time in months. The cruel geometry of aging had begun its work on both of us—crow's feet around her eyes, the way her mouth settled into something between resignation and judgment. We'd been inseparable once, back when we believed friendship was permanent rather than conditional.

"I remember the goldfish," I said. "The one we liberated from its bowl."

"Titan," she said. "You named him Titan. Like that was funny."

It had been funny, back when we were twenty-three and stoned and certain we were the main characters in some cosmic joke. We'd flushed Titan into the pool as an act of mercy—better to die in something resembling freedom than circle a glass prison until his organs failed.

"He lasted three weeks," I said. "Maybe four."

"Your dog found him first." Elena's voice cracked. "Remember? Buster started barking at the water like he'd seen something. And you just—you just laughed."

I had laughed. I'd laughed at the grotesque circle of it: a creature fighting for life in water too deep to sustain him, and then surfacing dead for a creature who'd only wanted to play. The sphinx had offered me its riddle that night, and I'd chosen mockery instead of wisdom.

"I should have gotten you help," Elena said, stubbing out her cigarette. "When you stopped sleeping. When you started talking about riddles and answers. I thought it was a phase."

"You were a good friend."

"Was I?" She stood up, joints popping. "A good friend would have told you that not everything is a riddle to be solved. Some things are just holes you throw things into and hope they don't come back up."

She left without another word, and I stood alone by the pool's edge, watching something break through the algae. A gold-orange flash, impossible and persistent. Titan—or his descendant—still circling, still surviving, still demanding to be seen.

The sphinx had been wrong all along. Some riddles don't have answers. They just have witnesses.