Riddles by the Empty Pool

The sphinx had seen better days. Its limestone face was eroded, one ear chipped away by time or teenage vandalism, its wing broken in three places. Still, it crouched beside the empty pool at the Pineview Motor Lodge, eternal riddle frozen on its cracked lips.

Mira sat on the pool's edge, dangling her legs into the dry concrete basin. Thirty-two years old, three months post-divorce, currently bearing the crushing weight of her father's declining health and a career that had plateaued into something resembling fulfillment but feeling mostly like compromise.

"You're going to fall in," a voice said.

She turned. A man stood near the sphinx, maybe forty, wearing a suit that said salesman or middle management or midlife crisis.

"There's no water," she said.

"Exactly." He approached, offering a hand. "David. I'm in 214."

"Mira. 206."

They'd passed each other in the hallway twice. This was a motel for people in transition — divorce lawyers, medical treatments, job relocations. No one stayed at Pineview by choice.

"The sphinx," David said, nodding at the statue. "You know what she asks?"

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening."

"Man." He sat beside her, not too close. "Crawling as a baby, walking upright, then with a cane." He paused. "I think it's wrong."

She looked at him, really looked — the lines around his eyes, the way his tie was loosened, the wedding ring tan line still visible. "Oh?"

"The riddle assumes we figure it out. That we understand ourselves by the end." He gestured at the empty pool. "Most of us just keep crawling."

Something in his voice made her chest ache. "What are you bearing, David?"

He laughed, surprised and dark. "A daughter who won't speak to me. A mortgage I can't afford. The knowledge that I spent twenty years becoming someone my wife could leave without looking back."

The sun was setting. The sphinx's shadow stretched toward them across the pool bottom, cracked and angled.

"I'm a nurse," Mira said suddenly. "I wanted to be a painter."

"Do you still paint?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I have to eat. Because my father's medications cost four thousand dollars a month. Because at some point, the dream becomes just another thing you're bearing."

David stood and held out his hand. "Come to dinner, Mira. We can bear it together for one night."

She hesitated. Then she took his hand. The sphinx watched them walk toward the motel office, its broken wing casting a long shadow, its riddle unanswered, its face serene in the gathering dark.

Some things, perhaps, were never meant to be solved.