The Last Riddle

Marcus found her in the breakroom at 6 PM, the fluorescents humming overhead like dying insects. She sat before an orange that she'd segmented into perfect quarters, arranging them on a paper towel with surgical precision.

'You're still here,' he said, though it wasn't a question.

Clara looked up. She was twenty-six, brilliant, and already being hollowed out by the machine. 'The sphinx awaits.'

Everyone called him that—Thompson, the division head who'd built a corporate pyramid of account executives and analysts, each level supporting the weight of those above. He asked riddles in meetings, not the fun kind. Questions designed to expose weakness: 'If your team missed quota by three percent, but your competitor missed by four, have you won or lost?' There was never a right answer. The point was the watching.

'I quit today,' Clara said.

Marcus felt something tighten in his chest. He was forty-three, divorced, two decades into running this same race toward nothing he could name. 'What will you do?'

'Travel.' She popped an orange segment into her mouth. 'Egypt, maybe. See the real sphinx. The one made of limestone and mystery, not performance metrics and fear.'

She stood, gathering her things. The office beyond the glass wall was dark except for Thompson's corner office, still illuminated like a beacon. Marcus thought about the orange sunrise he'd seen that morning from his treadmill, running toward a day that would look exactly like the one before, and the one before that. The same meetings, the same riddles, the same slow erosion of whatever he'd once meant to become.

'You could come,' Clara said at the door.

He watched Thompson's silhouette move behind the glass, the sphinx pacing his pyramid, hungry for the next riddle.

'I can't,' Marcus said, and the lie tasted like ash in his mouth.

Clara left. Marcus returned to his desk, sat in the ergonomic chair he'd spent two thousand dollars on, and opened the spreadsheet he'd been staring at for ten years. Outside, the sun was setting, painting the sky in impossible shades of orange and pink, colors too wild for corporate life. He thought about running—really running—not on a treadmill that went nowhere, but toward something real.

Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he'd change everything.

The sphinx smiled in its glass cage, and Marcus kept running in place.