The Last Riddle

Elena stood before the sphinx, its limestone body weathered by five thousand years of desert wind. At sixty-three, with silver hair escaping her straw hat, she'd become something of a riddle herself—that woman traveling alone, carrying the weight of a thirty-year marriage like a stone in her chest.

The guide had abandoned her an hour ago, frustrated by her silence. She preferred it this way. The pyramids rose behind her like impossible mountains, monuments to men who believed they could conquer death. David would have read every plaque, photographed every angle. He'd been the one with the PhD, the one who'd planned this trip decades ago.

A cat—skinny, patchy fur the color of sand—wound between her ankles, purring like a small engine. She knelt, her knees cracking, and scratched behind its ears. David had been allergic. They'd never had pets.

"You know," she whispered to the cat, "he died four months ago, and I haven't told a soul."

The truth was, their marriage had been a pyramid too—impressive from the outside, mostly empty spaces within. He'd loved the idea of her more than the reality. The woman he described at his funeral bore no resemblance to the Elena who drank wine alone in the kitchen, who'd taken a lover at fifty, who'd lied about her orgasms for three decades.

The cat nibbled her finger. She should feel guilty, speaking ill of the dead. Instead, she felt something dangerous and electric: freedom.

The sphinx stared past her, its human face eroded beyond recognition or judgment. What riddle would it pose now? What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? The answer wasn't man. The answer was a woman who'd spent her youth being someone's daughter, her middle years being someone's wife, and now—now she didn't know what she was becoming.

Elena removed her hat and let the desert wind tangle her hair. Somewhere in this vast, ancient landscape, David's ashes weren't scattered—he'd wanted to be buried in the family plot. She'd scattered them anyway, off the coast of Maine, because he'd hated the ocean.

"That's my riddle," she told the sphinx. "How do you become yourself when you've spent a lifetime becoming someone else?"

The cat, bored with philosophy, slunk away toward the pyramids. Elena stood, dusted off her skirt, and followed it. Whatever waited in the third act of her life—three legs, three decades, whatever came next—she would walk toward it on her own terms.