The Last Sphinx

I was studying the sphinx moth's metamorphosis when everything fell apart. The lab was quiet at 2 AM, the specimen under my microscope suspended in that crucial moment between pupa and adult—a creature that lives only to mate and die, consuming no food, never knowing its own brief beauty.

Barnaby, my elderly golden retriever, lay on the lab floor, his breathing ragged. The vet said maybe weeks. I'd started bringing him to work so I wouldn't come home to an empty apartment. So I wouldn't come home to her absence.

Elena and I had played padel every Tuesday for three years. The court was where we'd first kissed—behind the clubhouse after a match, her skin still damp with exertation, smelling of expensive perfume and competition. She played aggressively, swinging with a violence that should have warned me. But I'd found it thrilling then.

"You're thinking about her again," said Sarah, the night researcher, appearing in the doorway. She was right. I was always thinking about Elena—in the way sphinx moths are drawn to light, knowing it will burn them.

My phone lit up. A text from Elena: *Padel tonight? Marcus cancelled.*

Sarah watched me read it. "She left you six months ago. For Marcus. Who plays padel with her now."

"She's lonely," I said, the words tasting like ash.

"Or bored," Sarah said. "Or cruel. Do you know what sphinx means?"

I looked at the specimen, waiting for an answer I couldn't give.

"It comes from the Greek 'to strangle,'" Sarah said softly. "The sphinx strangled those who couldn't solve its riddle. Some questions kill you if you answer them wrong."

Barnaby whined, and I knelt beside him, burying my face in his familiar fur. The moth began to emerge from its pupa, wings crumpled and wet, unfurling slowly in the microscope's light. Something that would never eat, never rest, never pause to wonder why it existed. Just driven toward its purpose, however brief.

I deleted Elena's text without replying. Some riddles you solve by refusing to answer them at all.