The Living Room Sphinx

Marcus had been a cable technician for seventeen years, and somewhere around year twelve, he'd stopped seeing the people behind the doors. Just jobs. Just hookups. Just the next damn house on the route.

Then came the old Victorian on Oak Street, where the woman who answered the door looked like she hadn't slept since the Bush administration.

"It's the cable," she said, leading him through rooms cluttered with books and half-packed boxes. "It went out during the storm, and now I can't get anything but static."

The first thing he noticed was the statue—a sphinx, nearly life-sized, crouched in the corner of her living room like it was judging everyone who entered. Its face was chipped, one ear missing, but the eyes remained uncomfortably detailed.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she followed his gaze. "My husband's. He left it behind. Said it reminded him of me."

"Charming."

"He meant it as a compliment. Something about riddles and silence and men who never figure out the answer until it's too late." She sank onto her sofa, exhausted. "Do you have a wife, Marcus?"—reading his name tag like it held the secret to something.

"Divorced. Six years."

"She leave you for someone who could actually talk about his feelings?"

Marcus laughed, surprised. "Something like that."

Outside, lightning cracked the sky in half, and the room went dark. When the emergency lights flickered on, she was watching him with those sphinx-like eyes, calculating something.

"You ever feel like you're living someone else's life?" she asked quietly. "Like there's a version of you who made all the right choices, and you're just the cable repairman in his shadow?"

The question hit him like something physical. Because yes, actually. Every single day.

"The cable's loose in the basement," he said instead. "I'll fix it."

He worked while she talked—about the husband who'd left, the PhD she'd abandoned, the novel she'd been writing for a decade that had exactly three chapters. All while the sphinx watched them both with its broken, knowing smile.

When he finished, she pressed a check into his hand and said, "You know what the sphinx's riddle really was? What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?"

"Man. Childhood, adulthood, old age."

"That's the answer they give you in school." She touched the statue's chipped face. "But my husband always said the real riddle was why we spend so much time crawling, then walking, then leaning on canes—when we could just learn to fly."

Marcus stood in her doorway for a long moment. The storm had passed. The cable was fixed.

"I should go."

"You should," she agreed. "But you could also not."

He left anyway. But for weeks afterward, every time he climbed into his van, every time he knocked on another stranger's door, he thought about sphinxes and riddles and all the questions he'd stopped asking himself somewhere around year twelve.

The next time he drove past Oak Street, the house was empty. For sale sign in the yard. The sphinx was gone from the window.

He pulled over and sat in his van for twenty minutes, wondering about versions of himself who might have made different choices. Then he called his ex-wife. Just to hear her voice. Just to remember what it sounded like when someone still believed in riddles worth solving.