Riddles in the Water

The papaya was rotting on the counter. Sarah had bought it three days ago, back when we still spoke in complete sentences, before the silence between us grew louder than any argument. Now its skin was mottled brown, soft as a bruise, and I couldn't bring myself to touch it.

Our cat, Bast, wound between my legs as I stood in the kitchen that morning. She'd been Sarah's cat originally, a rescue with one ear and trust issues, but lately she'd been sleeping on my side of the bed. Animals know before you do. They sense the empty spaces opening up like wounds.

"You coming to padel tonight?" Marcus's text glowed from my phone.

Padel. Wednesday nights with the boys from accounting — backhands against the glass walls, the satisfying thwack of the ball, beers afterward where we complained about marriages and mortgages and mortgages on marriages we'd already left. I should have gone. Motion is good for grief. Sweat is cheaper than therapy.

Instead, I found myself at the pet store, staring into a tank of goldfish. Fifty of them, orange flashes in filtered water, mouths opening and closing in perpetual surprise. They say goldfish have three-second memories. Imagine it — every circumnavigation of their bowl is a discovery. Every encounter with the plastic castle is new and wondrous. No ruminating at 3 AM. No replaying conversations you should have had differently.

"Can I help you?" The teenager behind the counter had braces and acne and the effortless cruelty of the young.

"Do they ever get lonely?" I heard myself ask.

He shrugged. "They're fish."

I bought the sphinx instead. A small bronze figurine from the sale shelf, half-price because its wing was chipped. The Great Sphinx of Giza has stood guard for 4,500 years, watching empires rise and fall, its human-lion face weathering sandstorms and tourists alike. It knows the answer to its own riddle: everything decays. Even stone. Even love.

That night, I threw the papaya in the trash. Bast watched from the counter, tail twitching. The sphinx sat on the windowsill, its chipped wing catching the streetlamp's glow. And somewhere in that apartment, in the space between what we'd promised and what we'd become, I finally let myself cry.

The goldfish would have forgotten by morning.