Riddles in the Rain

The HDMI cable lay severed between them like a dead snake, its copper entrails exposed. Sarah had ripped it from the wall during their third fight of the week—something about Marcus spending more time with his screens than with her.

Now he sat by the hotel pool in Luxor, watching tourists swim laps beneath an ominous sky. His iPhone glowed with another unread message from her. *I don't know who you are anymore.*

Marcus typed and deleted a response three times. What could he say? That he'd been working eighty-hour weeks to afford this vacation? That he'd forgotten how to be anything but the person who provided?

Lightning fractured the horizon, violet veins through slate-gray clouds. The swimmers scattered, grabbing towels and drinks. A monsoon was coming.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" said a woman beside him. She was perhaps sixty, silver-haired, reading a paperback with a sphinx on the cover. "The way the sky tears itself open."

Marcus nodded. "My wife left me. Well, she's back at the room, but... she left."

"Ah." The woman marked her page with a finger. "The sphinx's riddle: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening?" She smiled. "Life's simpler than we make it. We crawl, we stand, we limp. That's all."

"What if you never learned to stand?" Marcus asked.

"Then you crawl forever." She gestured to his phone. "Or you swim in circles until you drown."

Rain began to fall, heavy warm drops that quickly soaked through his shirt. The woman closed her book and walked toward the hotel.

Marcus sat there as the storm broke open, water streaming down his face, indistinguishable from tears. His iPhone buzzed repeatedly on the chair beside him—Sarah, calling, calling, calling. He watched it light up again and again like a dying star, a final frantic pulse before it went dark forever, before the screen shattered against the pool tiles, before he finally stood up and walked back to their room to find out what—or who—was left between them.