The Last Goldfish of Summer

The Sphinx sat in her courtyard, its limestone face weathered by three decades of desert sun, questioning nothing and everyone. Maya had inherited it with the house, along with her husband's silence. Now, as she watched the goldfish — three bright orange smudges — swimming circles in the fountain, she realized she'd become the riddle.

"Marcus would have known what to feed them," she said aloud to the empty patio. Her voice sounded thin against the running water, a constant she'd stopped hearing months ago.

Marcus had collected riddles the way other men collected baseball cards. He'd loved the Sphinx's paradox: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening? Answer: man, crawling, walking, leaning. What he'd never understood was that some answers change. Some mornings you wake up and you're still crawling.

The goldfish surfaced, mouths opening and closing in silent pleas. Maya dropped flakes into the water. They'd been Marcus's fish, really — he'd named them Ocher, Amber, and Rust, his little joke about their identical orange scales. Now she couldn't tell them apart. Maybe they were all the same fish, returning and returning, like answers to questions she'd forgotten how to ask.

Her phone buzzed on the patio table. Mark from work, again. The project deadline tomorrow. The sphinx of spreadsheets and quarterly projections. She let it ring.

The sun was setting behind the desert ridges, painting the courtyard in shades of apricot and flame. The Sphinx's shadow stretched across the patio, reaching toward her like an accusation.

"You're the one who's supposed to ask questions," Maya told it. But the Sphinx only stared past her, toward the darkening horizon where the sky burned orange and purple, the colors of bruising.

She thought about Marcus's last year — the riddles he'd stopped answering, the words he'd lost. Alzheimer's had been the ultimate sphinx, stripping him of question and answer both, until he was just a mouth opening and closing like the goldfish, swimming in circles through rooms he no longer recognized.

Maya stood up, her joints stiff. The running water had stopped making sense months ago, but she kept the fountain running anyway. Some rituals you don't question.

She walked to the edge of the fountain and trailed her fingers through the water. The goldfish scattered, orange flashes against the darkening surface. They'd forget her touch in seconds. That was the luxury of them — the forgetting.

The Sphinx knew: the hardest riddle wasn't what you lost. It was what you chose to remember.

Maya turned toward the house as the last light died behind the mountains, leaving the courtyard in darkness, with only the sound of water and the silent, watching stone.