Riddles in the Dark

The iPhone screen illuminated David's face at 3 AM, another notification from Sarah that he couldn't bring himself to read. Three weeks of silence between them, except for these digital apparitions that arrived like clockwork—fragments of sentences, half-formed questions, things that might have been important or might have been nothing at all.

His cat, Bast, regarded him with ancient, liquid eyes from the windowsill, indifferent to his insomnia. She'd appeared on his fire escape two years ago, during the worst month of his life, and simply refused to leave. Some creatures sensed when you needed them most.

David swiped the notification away and opened the dating app instead, scrolling through faces that blurred together like wet paint. Everyone looked happy, everyone looked whole, everyone looked like they knew something he didn't.

His phone battery died at 17%, leaving him in darkness with nothing but Bast's rhythmic purring and the weight of everything he couldn't say to Sarah anymore.

The sphinx had asked him: What is the thing that speaks without a mouth, hears without ears, and has no body? The answer was echo, but David had been wrong about so much for so long that he'd lost faith in riddles, in answers, in the possibility that anything could be solved.

Bast jumped onto his chest, kneading with precise, clinical efficiency. Somewhere in this city, Sarah was probably awake too, perhaps staring at her own dead screen, perhaps wondering why the simplest questions had become impossible to ask.

He scratched behind Bast's ears and thought about how love was like a sphinx's riddle—devouring you when you couldn't solve it, and sometimes even when you could.