Riddles We Cannot Answer

The pool hadn't been drained in months. Green scum filmed the surface like a cataract over something that once saw clearly. Elena stood at the edge, her divorce papers folded into her purse like a weapon she hadn't decided whether to use.

"You're doing it again," Marcus said from the patio doors. "That thing where you disappear inside your own head."

"The sphinx moth," she said, not turning around. "Your mother's collection. Remember? She called them the souls of the dead, come back to whisper their riddles."

"She was dying, El. The medication made her say things."

Behind them, lightning fractured the sky—violent, beautiful, the kind that makes you understand why ancient people believed gods were fighting overhead. The storm had been building for hours, the air thick with that particular pressure that precedes something breaking.

"What's the riddle, Marcus?" Elena finally faced him. Ten years of marriage, and she still couldn't read him. That was the problem, wasn't it? He was a question she'd answered wrong a thousand times.

"What riddle?"

"The one this whole thing was supposed to solve." She gestured at the house, the pool, the life they were dismantling piece by piece. "We thought if we changed everything—new house, new jobs, maybe a child eventually—that we'd become people who knew how to love each other properly. But we just became tired people in a nicer house."

The first drops of rain hit the patio stones, dark circles that spread and vanished. Marcus stepped closer. His eyes were the same warm brown she'd fallen for at that office Christmas party, back when they were both young enough to believe in simple things.

"Maybe that's not a riddle with an answer," he said quietly. "Maybe it's just what happens."

"That's not comforting."

"I'm not trying to be comfortable. I'm trying to be true."

Water began to sheet from the gutters, drumming against the dying algae of the pool. Elena thought about sphinx moths, about metamorphosis, about how some creatures have to dissolve completely before they can become something else. She'd been waiting for their transformation for a decade.

Another flash of lightning, closer now. The air smelled of ozone and wet earth and the particular melancholy of endings.

"I packed your things," she said. "They're in the garage."

Marcus nodded once, sharply, like accepting a diagnosis. He turned toward the door, then paused.

"You know," he said, not looking back, "I never liked your mother's moths. But I loved how they made your eyes light up when you talked about them."

He left her alone with the rain and the riddles she couldn't solve, watching water pockmark the surface of a pool that reflected nothing clearly anymore.