The Garden of Forgotten Things

Margaret stood before the cracked **sphinx** statue in what remained of her mother's garden, its limestone face weathered into something almost tender now—the riddle it posed no longer about identity but about endurance. Three months since the funeral, and still she couldn't bring herself to enter the house.

The **goldfish** pond had become a swamp of choked vines and stagnant **water**, its former inhabitants long dead. She remembered her mother at seventy, still feeding them every morning with the ritualistic devotion of someone who'd outlived her husband, her purpose, her own wildness. "They're company," she'd say, though Margaret suspected her mother simply needed something to keep living that required so little from her.

Her ex-husband's **dog**—a golden retriever named Buster who'd chosen Margaret in the divorce—whined at her heels. Poor, loyal Buster, who'd sat by the door for weeks waiting for David to return, until finally accepting that Margaret was the one who stayed. David had been so certain about what he wanted: a life without the weight of her mother's decline, without the endless weekends driving to this crumbling house with its impossible garden and its swallowed grief.

"You're drowning," David had said over dinner the night he left. "And I can't swim with you anymore."

Margaret knelt beside the pond, reached into the murky water, and pulled out a small ceramic treasure—a fairy figurine she'd placed there thirty years ago. Its painted smile remained impossibly cheerful. Buster pressed his warm flank against her, and she buried her face in his coarse fur, letting the tears come at last, hot and fast.

The sphinx seemed to watch her with ancient patience. Perhaps the riddle had never been about what she'd lost, but what she'd choose to carry forward. She stood, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and reached for her phone to call the landscaper. The pond could be restored. The garden could bloom again. And perhaps, in tending to what remained, she would learn to live in the present instead of the past.