Riddles by the Pool

The hotel pool was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly what Elena needed. She'd left David asleep in their room, his breathing rhythmic and accusing, though he'd said nothing. He never did. That was the problem.

She slipped into the water, the shock of cold sharp against her skin. Swimming had always been her refuge—the silence underwater, the rhythmic stroke, the way everything above the surface dissolved into distorted light and shadow. Here, she didn't have to parse David's micro-expressions or decode his silences.

On the pool deck, an enormous marble sphinx regarded her with enigmatic eyes. The hotel's attempt at exoticism—kitschy, too on-the-nose. The sphinx posed riddles, couldn't be tricked, devoured those who failed to answer correctly. Elena had married a sphinx three years ago. David's face gave nothing away. His feelings, if they existed at all, were locked behind inscrutable eyes. Every conversation was a test she hadn't known she was taking.

A ginger cat appeared from the darkness, tail held high, and sat beside the sphinx's paw. It watched Elena swim, its yellow eyes unnervingly similar to David's when he was deciding whether to be tender or cold. She'd stopped trying to predict which version of him would come home from work.

The cat meowed, a sharp demand in the quiet.

Elena stopped swimming, treading water. "What?" she whispered. "What's the riddle?"

The cat began grooming itself, indifferent to her existential crisis.

That morning, David had watched her pack for this weekend getaway—his anniversary gift to her, to them—and asked only: "Do you think this will fix things?"

She hadn't answered. Because she didn't know what needed fixing, or if the broken thing was their marriage or simply her perception of it. David was a sphinx, and she'd run out of answers.

The water suddenly felt too cold, too heavy. Elena pulled herself toward the pool's edge, where the sphinx stood eternal, where the cat watched with ancient, knowing eyes. Some riddles, she realized, weren't meant to be solved. Some sphinxes didn't devour you—they simply waited, stone-faced, while you learned to live with the questions.

Behind her, the hotel room door opened. David's footsteps approached across the stone deck.

The cat vanished into darkness, leaving only the sphinx, its smile faint and terrible in the moonlight.