Riddles We Never Answered

The dog died on a Tuesday, which felt unfair—Tuesdays were for spreadsheets and team meetings, not for burying childhood companions. Elias found Maggie crying in the garden, where she'd planted spinach in desperate spring optimism, now overrun with weeds. She held the vet's paperwork like evidence she couldn't bear to present in court.

"We said we'd wait," she whispered. "For things to settle down. For better timing." Two years of trying, two miscarriages, and now this—the final death of the life they'd built together, piece by piece.

Elias thought about his father, the way he'd wielded baseball metaphors like weapons. "Life's not a game, son, but you still gotta swing." He'd hated those clichés, especially after the stroke left his father a bear of a different sort—confused, angry, trapped in a body that betrayed him.

Inside, Maggie's laptop displayed another negative test. They'd stopped trying months ago, but she still checked, compulsive as prayer. Sphinx-like, the results stared back: inscrutable, silent, demanding answers they couldn't provide. What do you do when the riddle is your own body?

"Remember that night in Cairo?" Elias asked suddenly. They'd stood before the actual Sphinx, drunk on cheap wine and the audacity of being young and in love. "You asked what it would ask us, if it could speak."

Maggie laughed, cracked and lovely. "I said it would ask: What do you do when the future you planned dissolves?"

"And I said..."

"You said: Build something new."

She turned from the window. "I'm so tired of building, El."

"Then we stop," he said, and meant it. They'd bear this grief together, or not at all. The spinach could wait. The dog was gone. But they were still here, sphinx-less and riddle-free, facing something harder than answers: beginning again.