Riddles in the Garden

The statue of the sphinx had been in Mother's garden for thirty years, its limestone face eroded by rain, its wings chipped where the neighborhood kids had thrown stones. Now it sat on Elena's balcony, watching her cook dinner for David—David, who had left her six months ago for a woman who didn't believe in monogamy but did believe in astrology.

"You're still eating that garbage?" David's voice came from the doorway. He'd let himself in again. He always let himself in.

Elena stirred the spinach wilting in the pan, thinking about how she used to make this for him after his baseball games in college. How he'd smell like sweat and dirt and champagne from their victories, how he'd eat everything she put in front of him and say her cooking was the only thing that kept him sane. Now he was vegan, or plant-based, or something that changed every three months depending on what his new girlfriend believed.

"It's just spinach, David. It's not garbage."

"You know what the psychiatrist said about your iron levels. You're exhausted, Elena. You look like hell."

The sphinx seemed to smirk at her from its corner. Riddle me this: when does leaving someone become its own form of staying?

She turned off the stove. "I'm fine. What do you want?"

He stepped closer, and she could smell his cologne—something woodsy and expensive, not the cheap sandalwood oil he'd worn when they were twenty-three and broke and happy. "I want to come home. She wasn't—she wasn't you."

The spinach grew cold in the pan. Outside, someone's radio played the commentary from a baseball game, the announcer's voice rising with the tension of a ninth-inning rally. Elena thought about the summer of 2018, when they'd camped on the floor of this apartment and listened to games on a transistor radio, David explaining the statistics, the strategy, the quiet chess match hidden inside all that noise.

She looked at the sphinx, its eroded face holding secrets it would never tell. Some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some questions didn't have answers, only consequences.

"You can't," she said. "Not anymore."

He stopped. "Because I left?"

"Because you think I'm still the person who waits."

David stood in her kitchen, surrounded by the ghost of their life together, and Elena realized she'd been waiting for this moment—not so he could come back, but so she could finally say no. The sphinx watched them both, its stone mouth curved in something like wisdom, something like pity, something entirely beyond human caring.