Riddles of the Afterlife

Maya stood in her kitchen at 11:47 PM, staring at the wilted spinach in her refrigerator like it held the answers to questions she'd stopped asking three months ago. The cat, Bast, wound around her ankles, demanding. Some things didn't change, even when everything else had.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from David: "You still awake? I'm a zombie at this point. The merger talks are going nowhere."

She almost didn't reply. David was her work husband, the label they'd jokingly given their alliance against the corporate machinations at the museum. But somewhere between the late-night emails and the shared flask of whiskey during the gala disaster, it had become something more complicated. Something she wasn't ready to name.

"Awake," she typed. "Come over. I have spinach that needs eating before it completes its decomposition cycle."

He arrived twenty minutes later, smelling of expensive scotch and exhaustion. They ate the spinach, scrambled with eggs and too much garlic, standing in her kitchen because the dining table was covered with the sphinx research she'd been ignoring since Theo died.

"The riddle was never the point," David said, looking at the scattered papers. Theo had spent his life obsessed with the Sphinx's riddle—what walks on four legs, then two, then three. He'd written articles, given lectures, analyzed it through every academic lens. "The point is that everything changes. The answer is time."

Maya felt something crack open in her chest. "You've been reading his work."

"I've been reading you," David said quietly. "You've been walking on three legs since the funeral. And I've been letting you."

"That's not fair—"

"Isn't it?" He set down his fork. "We're all zombies, Maya. Going through motions because the alternative is feeling everything at once. But Theo wouldn't want you to be a riddle without an answer."

Bast jumped onto the counter, butted her head against Maya's hand. Purring, alive, completely unconcerned with existential crises.

"What if I don't know what comes next?" Maya whispered. "What if I'm still the riddle?"

David took her hand across the counter. His palm was warm, real. "Then we figure it out together. The sphinx didn't demand perfection. Just the truth."

Outside, the city hummed with millions of people, all of them becoming something else, all of them carrying riddles they hadn't solved yet. Inside, Maya ate her cold spinach and felt almost okay with not knowing.