Riddles in the Afternoon

Elena sat before the fragments of the limestone sphinx, her hands trembling as they always did now. The restoration project had been her escape—something ancient and broken that she could actually fix. Her marriage, by contrast, had been crumbling for months, silent and irreparable.

She peeled an orange, the citrus scent sharp and cutting through the dusty museum air. Julius had loved oranges. He'd eat them messily, juice dripping down his chin, laughing at her precision, her need for napkins, for order. That was before. Before the nights when he'd come home smelling of someone else's perfume, before the conversations that circled each other like strangers in an elevator.

"You're like a sphinx," he'd told her once, exhausted by her silence. "All riddles and no answers."

The irony wasn't lost on her now.

Her phone buzzed. Sarah, the office manager, asking if she'd be at the gallery opening. There would be catering—spanakopita, fresh spinach wrapped in flaky pastry, white wine flowing freely. Everyone pretending things were fine. The art world excelled at pretense.

Elena looked at the sphinx's half-formed face, its enigmatic smile surviving three thousand years while her own had faded in three. What riddles had this creature posed to passersby in the ancient desert? What answers had it demanded?

"The answer is loss," she whispered to the empty restoration room. "The answer is that everything breaks. Even stone."

She placed a segment of orange on her tongue, bitter and sweet together, and resumed her work on the creature's damaged paw. Some things, she decided, could still be made whole again. Just not everything.