Riddles in a Bowl

The goldfish - nameless, orange as a warning light - floated sideways in its bowl, its gills working with the slow desperation of something that had forgotten how to swim properly. Elena watched it through her third glass of wine, thinking about how marriage sometimes felt like this: two creatures in a too-small container, circling each other without ever meeting.

"He's going," Marcus said from the doorway. His hair - once the color of burnt sugar, now silvering at the temples - was damp from the shower. He wouldn't look at her.

"She," Elena corrected automatically. "She's going."

"Right. Her."

The small bronze sphinx sat between them on the kitchen island, a souvenir from their trip to Cairo five years ago, back when they still bought things to commemorate being somewhere together. The sphinx's riddle had always seemed too easy: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? But the real riddle was the one they couldn't ask: how do you become strangers with someone who knows exactly how you take your coffee?

Elena had found a long hair wrapped around Marcus's phone charger two mornings ago - not the coarse gray of his own, but something finer, darker. She hadn't said anything. Instead, she'd flushed the toilet while he was in the shower, testing whether he'd flinch at the sudden noise. He hadn't.

"I'll flush her tomorrow," Marcus said, moving toward the bedroom without touching her, without touching the sphinx, without touching anything that might tether him to this room.

"She deserves better than tomorrow."

He stopped but didn't turn around. The set of his shoulders was unfamiliar - a new geography she hadn't mapped.

"Then what does she deserve, El?"

The goldfish rolled to the surface, mouth opening and closing in a silent final gasp. Elena swallowed the rest of her wine, set down the glass, and finally understood the sphinx's true riddle: what loses everything gradually, then all at once?

"Now," she said. "She deserves now."