The Last Riddle

The sphinx had been watching them for three years—her husband's trouvée from some antique shop, its ceramic face cracked with riddles nobody asked anymore. Elena ran her palm across its chipped ear, feeling the rough coolness, while David stood in the doorway, his suitcase already waiting downstairs.

"The goldfish needs feeding," she said, not turning around. The bowl sat on the windowsill, water clouding slightly. Orange flash of movement—there and gone, like the last three years.

"It's a fish, Elena. It'll be fine."

"Everything dies when you leave it alone."

David sighed, that sound that had once meant I'm tired and now meant I'm tired of this. "We're not leaving anything alone. We're just... taking space."

Space. The word floated between them like the goldfish surfacing for air, then sinking back into the murk. Elena remembered the night they bought the sphinx, drunk on cheap wine and the possibility that two people could actually make it. She'd asked him what riddle it would ask if it could speak.

He'd said: "What becomes smaller the more you add to it?"

She'd guessed wrong for hours. The answer was a hole, and he'd laughed, pulling her close in the antique shop's dusty light.

Now she turned to face him. His palm was pressed against the doorframe, fingers slightly curved. She knew those hands. She knew how they felt on her back, how they looked holding a coffee mug, how they trembled the first time his mother called her by the wrong name.

"What's the answer now?" she asked.

"To what?"

"The sphinx's riddle. What becomes smaller the more you add to it?"

David's expression softened, just slightly. "I don't know, El. I don't think there is one anymore."

The goldfish swam to the surface, mouth opening silently. Water lapped against the glass. Somewhere outside, wind moved through palm fronds in the neighbor's yard, that dry desert whisper that always made her feel like she was living somewhere she didn't belong.

"Maybe that's the problem," Elena said. "We kept adding. And it just kept getting smaller."

David nodded once, then turned away. The door clicked shut. The sphinx watched impassively. Elena dropped a pinch of food into the bowl and watched the water cloud, orange flash darting through the silence, alone now, answering no riddles at all.