Riddles We Don't Ask

The fertility clinic's waiting room smelled like antiseptic and last night's rain. Elena sat beside Marcus, her hands knotted in her lap, watching a clock that seemed deliberately cruel. Three years of treatments, of injections and blood tests, of hope calcifying into something brittle.

"They're swimming," the doctor had said during their first consultation, pointing to grainy ultrasound images. "But not enough of them. Not fast enough."

Now they sat in silence, their marriage stretched thin across the laminate table between them. Marcus squeezed her hand, his thumb tracing circles on her palm — the same way he'd done when he proposed, when she'd lost her job, when her mother died. Always the comforter, never the one to break.

The sphinx cat appeared three weeks later, a gaunt, wrinkled creature with enormous ears that seemed too large for its hairless body. Marcus found it shivering in their alleyway, its skin the color of storm clouds, its eyes like polished obsidian.

"We can't keep it," Elena said, but she was already reaching for the can opener.

The cat — Sphinx, because it demanded answers to questions they hadn't asked — became their strange, hairless child. It slept between them at night, its warmth a third body in their bed. It watched them with ancient eyes, as if knowing secrets about marriage, about wanting things you can't name.

"What are we swimming toward?" Elena asked one evening, as Sphinx sprawled across her lap, purring like a tiny engine. "If it's not a baby, then what?"

Marcus set down his wine glass. "We're swimming toward each other, El. Always have been."

That night, they didn't try to conceive. They made love slowly, without the clinical precision of ovulation charts and temperature readings. Afterward, Sphinx curled against Elena's stomach, his wrinkled body rising and falling with her breath.

In the darkness, Elena realized the riddle wasn't about children at all. The sphinx had been asking the wrong question. It wasn't: What walks on four legs, then two, then three? It was: Who holds you when you cannot hold yourself?

She pressed her face into Marcus's shoulder, inhaling his scent — cedar and sleep and something permanent.

"I'm okay," she whispered to the darkness, to the hairless cat, to the life they would build instead of the one they'd planned. "I think I'm finally okay."

Sphinx shifted, his sandpaper tongue rough against her wrist. Outside, rain began to fall, and somewhere in the distance, something was finally beginning to grow.