Riddles at the Net

The coiled **cable** behind my television had been fraying for months, much like everything else in my thirty-ninth year. I'd meant to replace it, just as I'd meant to leave Sarah, just as I'd meant to stop drinking myself into a **zombie**-like stupor every Friday night. But intention had become a hollow word, a promise I made to ghosts.

"You're late," she said from the kitchen, not looking up from her phone. We were supposed to be at **padel** practice in twenty minutes. The club was the last place we still went together, the last ritual remaining from a marriage that had otherwise calcified into separate rooms and separate lives.

"The meeting ran long." I opened the fridge, stared at nothing.

"The meeting always runs long, Marcus."

She was right. Everything in my life ran long. The commute, the days, the silences between us. I'd become a **sphinx** of my own making—a creature who asked no questions and offered no answers, simply stared enigmically across the dinner table while the possibilities of my youth calcified into stone.

Our golden retriever, Buster, nudged my hand with his wet nose. The only living thing in the house who still seemed glad to see me.

"You going?" Sarah asked, finally looking up. Her eyes were tired, the kind of tired that sleep couldn't fix.

"Yeah. Let me change."

On the court, something shifted. We were playing doubles against a couple we didn't know, and for the first time in years, Sarah laughed at something I said—really laughed, head thrown back, the sound startling and familiar. When she high-fived me after winning a point, her palm was warm against mine, and I remembered what it had felt like to want to touch her.

Afterward, we sat in the car, neither of us reaching for our phones.

"I'm going to cancel the cable," I said suddenly. "The service, I mean. I've been thinking about it."

She turned to me, something like hope or maybe just curiosity softening her face. "And what would we do instead?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe talk. Maybe figure out why we stopped."

Buster barked from the back seat, and Sarah reached back to scratch his ears, her fingers finding the exact spot behind his left ear that made his leg twitch.

"That sounds expensive," she said, but she was smiling.

"Probably," I said. "But I think we can afford it."