Riddles in the Dark

The dog wouldn't stop barking at 3 AM, that relentless rhythm that meant Arthur wasn't coming home again. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. I lay in bed listening, wondering when our marriage had become something I couldn't solve—like some ancient riddle carved in stone, where the answer kept changing just when I thought I'd finally understood it.

I got up, bare feet cold against the kitchen floor. The spinach in the crisper had gone slimy, another thing I'd forgotten to tend to while I was busy holding everything else together. I threw it out and watched the water running into the sink, thinking about Egypt, about how we'd stood before the Sphinx at dawn, Arthur making some joke about how even monuments couldn't last forever.

"That one will," I'd said, certain.

"Nothing does," he'd replied, and I'd laughed, not understanding he was telling me something true.

The dog whined from the hallway, abandoned. I filled his bowl, my hands shaking. All those riddles: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was always just time, just damage, just the way everything eventually breaks down.

I found myself running then—out the door, down the street, footsteps echoing in the empty predawn dark. Running toward nothing, away from nothing. Just the burning in my lungs and the truth I'd been avoiding: some questions don't have answers, only the asking, over and over, until you finally learn to live with the mystery of them.

The dog followed, as dogs do. As love does, sometimes.