Riddles in the Rain

The rain turned the driveway into a river of **water**, reflecting the gray sky as Elena sat in her parked car, her **iphone** glowing with messages she couldn't bring herself to answer. Three unread texts from David. One voicemail from her mother.

She'd spent the morning at the museum, standing before the **sphinx** exhibit, trying to decipher why ancient civilizations spent centuries carving riddles into stone while she couldn't even figure out if her marriage was worth saving. The sphinx's limestone face had weathered millennia. Her relationship had barely weathered five years.

A childhood memory surfaced: her father peeling an **orange** at the kitchen table, the citrus scent filling the room as he told her that marriage was like fruit—it could sweeten with time or rot from the inside out. She'd been eight then, watching the juice run down his fingers. Now she understood what he'd meant about quiet decay.

The car door opened. David slid into the passenger seat, rain dripping from his coat. He placed a container of cut **papaya** between them, the tropical fruit incongruous against the gray Michigan afternoon.

"I bought your favorite," he said, his voice careful, like he was approaching a wounded animal. "From that place on Fifth."

Elena looked at the bright pink flesh against the black container, the tiny black seeds like constellations suspended in sweetness. "I haven't eaten papaya since before the miscarriage."

The silence stretched between them, heavier than the rain hammering the roof.

"I know," David said. "I thought maybe..."

"You thought what? That exotic fruit would fix us? That if we pretended to be people who ate papaya in parked cars during rainstorms, we'd forget our daughter never drew breath?"

His hand reached for hers, stopped midway. "I thought we could start somewhere. Anywhere."

Outside, a **water** main burst somewhere down the street, sending a geyser into the air. Elena watched it rise and fall, thinking of riddles, and how the answer was never what you expected.

She took a piece of the papaya. It was perfectly ripe, the way **orange** segments were perfectly sweet, the way **iphone** notifications perfectly demanded attention. Some things were exactly what they appeared to be.

"Start with why you didn't come home last night," she said, and put the fruit in her mouth.