Riddles in the Sand

The Egyptian sun beat down on them as Elena traced the lifeline on David's palm, sweat making their skin slick against each other. "You're going to live a long time," she said, but her voice lacked conviction. They were standing before the Great Sphinx, its limestone face eroded by millennia, its riddles long since silenced by wind and sand.

David checked his iPhone for the third time in ten minutes, the blue light washing out his features in the harsh noon glare. "Flight's delayed," he muttered, not meeting her eyes. "We have two more hours."

Two more hours before they returned to their separate lives, before this affair that had sustained them through three conferences and countless late-night calls dissolved back into whatever dimension infidelity occupied when not actively practiced.

They walked toward the Nile, where vendors sold cold water in bottles that sweated profusely in the heat. Elena bought two, handed him one. The plastic crinkled loudly in the silence between them.

"The riddle of the Sphinx," she said suddenly. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening."

"Man," David replied automatically. "Crawls as a baby, walks upright, uses a cane in old age."

"But that's not really it, is it?" Elena pressed. "It's about how we're always becoming something else. Never quite who we were, never quite who we'll be."

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and for the first time in six months saw not the escape he provided but the compromise he represented. The iPhone buzzed in his pocket—a message from his wife, or maybe his daughter. He ignored it.

"What are we?" she asked.

David's phone slipped from his hand, hit the stone pavement, and spiderweb cracks fanned across its face like tragic geometry. He didn't pick it up. "I don't know," he said. "But I think we're done crawling."

The Sphinx watched them with its worn stone eyes, as it had watched countless others confront their own limitations. Some truths, Elena realized, were too heavy to carry across time zones. She took David's hand, their palms pressed together like they were trying to merge their lifelines, and for a moment they almost believed it could work.

Then his phone chimed again, and the spell broke. Some riddles solve themselves, not with answers, but with endings.