The Last Sphinx Moth

Margaret's father no longer recognized her. He lay in the hospital bed, his once-vital presence reduced to something hollow and aimless—a **zombie** of the man who'd taught her to identify constellations, who'd held her when her mother left. His eyes, the same gray as hers, stared past her shoulder as if watching something only he could see.

She reached for the electric razor. The nurse had suggested shaving his head—palliative care, they called it. Dignity. His white **hair** had been his vanity, the one thing he'd kept meticulously trimmed even as his mind frayed at the edges. Now it was thinning, patchy, another defeat in a war he'd never signed up for.

"You don't have to do this," said David from the doorway. Her brother hadn't visited in three months. The marriage. The new baby. Life.

"He would have wanted it," she said, though she didn't know if that was true anymore. The man she knew had been evaporating for years, leaving behind this **sphinx** of a father—inscrutable, silent, posing riddles she couldn't solve. What did he remember? What did he feel? The answers had died with his ability to speak.

She'd moved back home six months ago, leaving behind her career, her apartment, the life she'd built. Her friends said she was sacrificing herself. Her therapist called it closure. She called it the only choice she could live with.

Outside the window, something moved in the garden.

A **fox**, lean and bright as rust, stood beneath the ancient oak tree. It looked toward the house, ears pricked, then turned and vanished between the rhododendrons. Wild thing. Free thing. It would die someday too, but not like this. Not in pieces.

Margaret's fingers trembled as she turned on the razor. The sound was a low嗡—an insect, a machine, something from another world. She thought of sphinx moths, drawn irresistibly to flames they couldn't survive. Some creatures were built to burn themselves out.

Her father's eyes shifted, focused briefly on her hand. For a second, something passed between them—not recognition, but acknowledgment. He knew she was there. He knew someone was.

She bent over him and began to shear away what remained.