Riddles in Stone

The limestone sphinx gazes past me with those empty, knowing eyes—all seeing, all silent. Just like Mark in those final months.

His grey fedora rests on my head, smelling faintly of cedar and the clove cigarettes he smoked secretly in the garage. I'd stolen it from the closet this morning, needing to feel closer to him somehow. Needing to inhabit the space he'd left behind.

The iphone burns in my pocket. His phone—the one his sister gave me last week, saying, "There might be things you should know." I haven't been brave enough to unlock it. Not yet. But I brought it here, to this place of riddles and half-truths, thinking perhaps the ancient wisdom might help me decipher whatever secrets wait behind that screen.

A woman beside me adjusts her scarf, glancing at my reflection in the glass case. "That's quite a hat," she says. Her tone suggests she thinks I'm wearing it for fashion, for affect.

I almost tell her it belonged to my husband. That I'm wearing it because I'm half a person without him.

Instead I say, "It belonged to a sphinx."

She laughs, startled. "Is that so? And what riddles did he ask?"

"The usual," I reply. "Why did I stay? Why did he leave? What becomes of love when silence grows louder than words?"

The sphinx says nothing. Mark never answered either.

I pull the phone from my pocket. The screen lights up—no password required, his sister wasn't lying. My thumb hovers over the messages icon, then moves to photos instead.

I'm not ready for his voice. Not ready for whoever else might have received his words in those final, quiet months. But perhaps, I think, standing before this ancient creature that has witnessed thousands of years of human heartbreak, I'm ready to see what he saw.

To witness what he chose to capture.

To know what he chose to keep.

The first photo is of me. Sleeping. I don't remember him taking it.

The second is of this very room. This very sphinx.

The third, dated three days before he died, is a picture of me in his hat, caught unaware through the kitchen doorway. The caption beneath reads: "She doesn't know she's already answering her own riddles."

My hands tremble. The sphinx watches, impassive.

Some secrets, I realize, aren't betrayals. Sometimes a sphinx doesn't ask questions to test you—sometimes it asks them because it wants you to finally hear the answers you've been carrying all along.