Riddles in the Ash

Maya found another clump of his hair on her pillow this morning—long and silver, like a fallen eyelash from a giant. She should've cleaned it, but instead she pressed it to her lips, tasting salt and something vaguely metallic. David's body was leaving him in pieces, and she was collecting each one like evidence.

In the kitchen, she forced down a forkful of spinach. The doctor had said it would help with the iron, with the fatigue, with the pretending that everything wasn't slowly falling apart. The leaves were bitter and tangled on her tongue, exactly how she felt.

Three more months, the specialist had said. That was all the sphinx had deigned to reveal. The great riddle of her life: how to hold someone who was already becoming smoke, how to love something that was learning how to leave you.

David shuffled in, his walker clicking against the linoleum. He looked at her empty plate, at the spinach stuck to her teeth in the mirror's reflection.

"You've got a little..." He gestured at his own mouth, smiling that crooked, knowing smile that had undone her thirty years ago in a crowded bookstore.

She swallowed. "How's the crossword today?"

"Stuck on six-down. Something about... impossibilities." His fingers trembled as he picked up his pen.

Maya watched him—this man who had once climbed mountains, who had held her through three miscarriages and one magnificent, terrifying birth, whose body was now a labyrinth she couldn't navigate. The sphinx guarding the exit, asking questions she couldn't answer.

"Love," she said.

He looked up, startled.

"Six-down. The answer is love."

He wrote it down carefully, each letter a small monument. Then he looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in weeks.

"Maya?"

"Yes, David."

"Your hair..." He reached out, his fingers brushing her cheek. "It's like the first time I saw you. In that bookstore. You were reading..."

"Plato."

"No. The Egyptians. You were reading about the sphinx."

She hadn't remembered that. She hadn't known he'd noticed.

The spinach turned to ash in her mouth. The sphinx had finally given her its answer: love wasn't a riddle to be solved. It was simply sitting here, together, while the world burned down around them, holding each other's hair like something sacred.