The Last Summer

Elena watched him from the balcony of the hotel room, where he floated on his back in the pool below, arms spread like someone surrendering. The water glittered—artificial blue against the deepening purple of the Egyptian dusk. Beyond the hotel walls, the real sphinx watched from its museum pedestal, stone lips sealed with riddles she'd stopped asking years ago.

Inside their room, the bedside table held her vitamin supplements arranged in precise rows: D for the darkness she felt gathering, B for the brittle silence between them, iron for the blood she couldn't seem to make warm anymore. He called them her "little prayer candles." He meant it affectionately, once.

She peeled an orange, the bright citrus scent sharp against the stagnation of everything else. Her thumbnail broke the skin, releasing tiny sprays of essential oil into the air. She used to love how he'd watch her do this—something about the mess, the realness of it. Now he was down there, creating his own cleanliness.

They'd come here to fix it. That was the plan. Egypt, where civilization had learned to die beautifully. She'd thought: if we can't save us, at least we can witness something that lasted.

The balcony door slid open. He stood dripping in the frame, water pooling on the tiles at his feet.

"You coming down?"

"I took my vitamin," she said, which wasn't an answer.

He crossed the room, dripping onto the carpet, and reached for a segment of the orange she'd separated from the peel. His fingers brushed hers—the first intentional touch all day.

"The sphinx is closed," he said. "I wanted to see it with you."

"It's just a statue, Daniel."

"Everything is just something until you decide it isn't."

He ate the orange segment without looking at her. She watched his throat work. They were forty and thirty-eight respectively, and somewhere between the mortgage and his mother's funeral, they'd become strangers who shared a bed and a credit score.

The muezzin's call to prayer began from a nearby mosque, while outside the window, the desert sky burned to orange—that particular, bruised shade that made you understand why people believed in gods here, once.

"I don't know if I want to be fixed," she said finally.

He looked at her then, really looked at her, for the first time since they'd arrived.

"I don't either," he said. "But I think I want to be known. By you. Again."

She held out the last piece of orange. He took it. His fingers were cold from the pool. Hers were sticky with citrus. For a moment, just a moment, the sphinx in the distance seemed to smile instead of stare.