Riddles in the Afternoon
The papaya sat on the counter, its orange flesh speckled with black seeds like some forgotten galaxy. Elena stared at it, thinking how strange it was that she'd bought Marcos's favorite fruit out of habit, even though he'd been gone for three months.
Her cat, Baudelaire, wound around her ankles, yowling for breakfast. EleÂna sighed and opened a tin of pâtĂ©. At least the cat still needed her.
On the television, a padel match played silently—players in a glass cage, hitting balls against walls, trapped in their rectangle of competition. Marcos had loved padel. He'd played every Thursday with the same group of men, sweating and boasting and drinking afterward, while she sat at home.
She'd found the messages in February. Not an affair—he'd sworn it wasn't physical—but something worse: he'd fallen in love with someone he'd met at a conference. Someone who understood his work. Someone who could talk about cryptography until dawn while Elena slept beside him, dreaming of nothing at all.
The baseball trophy on the shelf gathered dust. He'd won it in college, some championship that meant everything to him at twenty-two and nothing now. She'd asked him once why he kept it. 'Because I was someone then,' he'd said.
And what was she now?
Outside, the city hummed. She walked to the window. In the neighbor's yard, a garden sphinx stared back at her—a replica, concrete and cracked, its face eroded by rain. The original sphinx had asked riddles, destroyed those who couldn't answer. This one only asked the weather.
Her phone buzzed. A message from him: Can we talk?
The sphinx's riddle echoed in her mind: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? A man. A life. A marriage.
Elena deleted the message without opening it. The papaya would ripen on the counter. The padel match would end. The cat would sleep. And tomorrow, she would wake up and figure out who she was when no one was watching.