Riddles in the Afternoon

Margaret placed the wide-brimmed hat on her husband's head, though his skin had grown too translucent for such gestures to matter. The hospice room smelled of antiseptic and forgotten promises.

"You always hated this hat," she whispered, smoothing the felt brim. Arthur's breathing rattled, a syncopated rhythm that had become their strange lullaby.

He cracked one eye open. "Like the sphinx," he rasped. "All riddles, no answers."

The sphinx pendant around her neck — his anniversary gift from thirty years ago — felt heavy against her throat. She'd worn it daily since his diagnosis three months ago.

Their tabby cat, Bast, jumped onto the bed, kneading Arthur's blanket with possessive purrs. In the hallway, their aging Labrador whined softly, sensing the shift in atmospheric pressure that precedes loss.

"Arthur," she said suddenly, "remember when we found those old vitamin bottles in your mother's attic? The ones from 1974?"

A ghost of a smile. "The elixirs of youth. Swear they kept us young, Mags."

They'd taken them religiously for a month during their first year of dating, a joke that had somehow become a ritual. The vitamins were probably just sugar and placebo, but that shared foolishness had bound them together when everything else felt uncertain.

"I don't want to be the sphinx," Arthur murmured, his fingers finding hers. "I don't want to leave you with riddles."

Margaret pressed her forehead to his. "You're not leaving me with riddles. You're leaving me with thirty years of answers."

The monitor slowed. Bast settled into the curve of Arthur's knees, purring louder now, a strange and stubborn comfort. In the hallway, the dog's whines softened to a rhythmic panting.

Arthur's last exhale was barely a breath at all.

Later, alone in their empty bedroom, Margaret removed the sphinx pendant and set it on the nightstand. The wide-brimmed hat hung on its hook, a silent sentinel. She opened the nightstand drawer and found the ancient vitamin bottle, saved all these decades like a talisman.

She swallowed two capsules, though they'd long since expired. Some rituals, she decided, deserved to survive the skeptics who created them.