Riddles in the Bowl

I'm watching the baseball game alone, another Sunday night in an apartment that still smells like her lavender perfume even after three months. The Reds are down by three in the seventh, and I'm nursing a whiskey that's mostly melted ice.

She kept a goldfish on the windowsill when we lived together. A betta she called Ramses, after the pharaoh, not the sphinx she'd write papers about for her dissertation. The fish lived in this tiny glass bowl, swimming in endless circles, and she'd say, "He's happy, don't you think? Sometimes a small world is enough."

Now the fish is dead, and I can't remember who took it when she left.

I turn off the game. The silence presses in like water. That's what she called us once—two sphinxes guarding secrets we wouldn't speak aloud. Her secrets were about wanting children, about her mother's cancer returning, about whether she loved me enough to stay. Mine were about how I'd stopped seeing the person I married, how I'd started planning my exit before she'd even packed a bag.

The goldfish bowl sits empty on my windowsill now. I cleaned it last week, scrubbed away the algae, but I can't bring myself to fill it again.

There's a baseball still somewhere in the closet—a signed one from the game where we first kissed, seventh inning stretch, fireworks afterward. I haven't looked for it. Some things you leave buried.

I pour another drink and watch the city lights through the window, thinking about riddles with no answers, about how we swim in circles until we forget we're swimming at all, about how the sphinx always devours those who can't solve her puzzles.

Outside, somewhere, a dog barks. The night goes on.