Riddles in the Palm of Your Hand

Maya had been dead six months when I found the sphinx in our attic—a small bronze figure she'd bought in Egypt years ago, its wings folded, its face worn smooth from where she'd rubbed it for luck. I held it in my palm, half-expecting it to speak, to give me something, anything, to hold onto.

That was the year I became a bull in a china shop of my own grief. I charged through workdays, meetings, dinner parties, head down, hooves clumsy, breaking things I didn't even see. My promotion came through—Senior Director of Operations—but it felt like winning a baseball game I hadn't realized I was playing. Everyone cheered. I stood at home plate, bat on shoulder, wondering why the crowd was roaring.

"You're in zombie mode, Marcus," Lena said one night. She was reading my palm at that dive bar near the waterfront, tracing the life line with her thumb. "You're here, but not here."

She was right. I'd been moving through the world like someone who'd died and forgotten to lie down.

"What's the answer?" I asked her, watching the sphinx I'd slipped into my pocket, its bronze body cool against my leg. "What's the riddle I'm supposed to solve?"

Lena smiled and closed my fingers around her own. "That's just it. There is no riddle. There's just—" She pressed my palm to my chest. "This. This moment. This breath."

Outside, baseball fans streamed past the bar windows after the game, their faces bright with victory or defeat. Inside, I sat with a woman I barely knew, holding a bronze sphinx in one hand, her hand in the other, and for the first time in six months, I felt something like hope—not the bright, soaring kind, but something smaller, truer. Something that could grow.

"Another round?" I asked.

"Another round," she said.

And somewhere in the space between heartbeats, I began to remember how to live.