Swimming Past the Sphinx

Elena swirled her champagne and watched the single goldfish swimming in the centerpiece tank beneath the ice sculpture of the Great Sphinx. It moved in endless circles, trapped in glass smaller than her studio apartment.

Across the room, her husband David gestured wildly with his half-empty crab cake, animatedly explaining something to the CEO. He wore the novelty sphinx hat she'd given him as a joke three years ago—back when they still found each other funny. The hat's pom-pom eyes bobbed with every emphatic nod.

Beside her, Ryan leaned in close. His breath smelled like gin and the spinach dip they'd both been avoiding. "Your husband's wearing a hat indoors. At a black-tie event."

"He thinks it's charming," Elena said. "I think it's a cry for help."

"You should leave him."

The goldfish paused, then resumed swimming. Elena thought about her mother, trapped in a marriage that had eroded like the actual Sphinx—weathered by time, reduced to something haunting but broken.

"I keep thinking about that myth," she said quietly. "The sphinx's riddle. What walks on four legs, then two, then three?"

Ryan studied her face. "The answer's a man. But I think you're asking a different question."

The goldfish surfaced, gulping air. Elena remembered the summer she was twelve, watching her father's goldfish die while her parents screamed in another room. She'd flushed it down the toilet, giving it a funeral pyre of blue water and spinning porcelain.

"The answer is someone who learns to stop swimming in circles," she said.

Ryan's hand found hers beneath the table. "So leave him."

Elena watched David laughing in his ridiculous hat, completely unaware that his wife was already gone.

The goldfish kept swimming, oblivious that some prisons have doors.