Storm Over the Sphinx

Elena found him again in the Egyptian gallery, fingers tracing the granite paw of the sphinx like he was memorizing its contours for a final exam. She should have kept walking. She should have finished her restoration work on the Ptolemaic funerary masks and gone home to Richard, who was probably already asleep on the sofa with a half-empty glass of whiskey and the television muttering news to no one.

Instead, she walked toward Marcus, and when he turned, his expression shifted from that hungry, predatory look to something softer, almost haunted.

"You're wearing it," he said, gesturing to her father's fedora, the one she'd stolen from the closet after the funeral. The hat smelled like old tobacco and winter, like the last conversation they'd never had.

"Running again?" she asked, though they both knew she wasn't. Not really.

Marcus laughed, that tired sound that had started to replace his actual laughter somewhere around month three of their affair. "We're all running, El. Just in different directions."

The trouble was, Elena didn't feel like she was running anywhere anymore. She felt like a zombie—shuffling through restored artifacts and aborted conversations, dead inside but somehow still moving, still hungry for something she couldn't name. The affair with Marcus had been supposed to make her feel alive again. Instead, it just made the decay more visible.

Thunder rattled the gallery's skylights. Outside, lightning fractured the evening sky, illuminating dust motes dancing around the sphinx's impassive face.

"The riddle," Marcus said suddenly. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening."

"Man," Elena said. "Infancy, adulthood, old age."

"Wrong." Marcus stepped closer, his hand hovering near her waist but not touching. "It's what we do after the person we were dies. Some of us keep walking. Some of us become the answer to a different riddle."

He kissed her then, and for a moment, Elena let herself believe this was electricity, this was lightning striking—not just two dead things pretending they could still burn.

But when she pulled away and saw her own exhaustion reflected in his eyes, she knew the truth: they were just two zombies who'd forgotten how to stay buried.

She left her father's hat on the sphinx's pedestal and walked out into the storm.