The Poolside Oracle

Martha sat by the hotel pool at 3 PM, the hour when honest light revealed everything she'd been avoiding. Her oversized sun hat—cruel, she thought—had become a shield against more than UV rays. At fifty-two, she'd stopped pretending the cocktail of vitamin supplements in her morning routine was about longevity. It was about staving off the inevitable decay that had already taken her mother, that was already etching faint maps around her eyes.

The pool was empty save for one elderly man doing laps with methodical precision. Martha watched him break the surface, again and again, a mechanical resurrection. She thought about David's final email, about the sphinx he'd seen in Cairo during his solo 'business trip'—the one that had ended their marriage. 'She asks the right question,' he'd written, 'but she has no answer for herself.'

The hotel courtyard had its own sphinx, a weathered concrete replica near the garden wall. Martha had stared at it each morning of this solo vacation, waiting for it to ask her something, anything. Instead it offered its eternal smirk, stone lips sealed around riddles she wasn't sure she wanted answered.

What are you running from? the sphinx seemed to say yesterday. And today: What are you running toward?

The lap swimmer pulled himself from the pool, dripping and vital. He walked toward her with the deliberate pace of a man who'd made peace with his body's betrayals. 'You're going to burn through that hat,' he said, not unkindly. 'Nothing wrong with a little sun on your face.'

Martha removed the hat. The light hit her full force. Behind the swimmer, the concrete sphinx waited, its riddle suspended in the afternoon heat. Some questions, she realized, weren't meant to be answered in an afternoon. They were meant to be lived with, the way you lived with the ghost of a marriage or the knowledge that all the vitamins in the world couldn't stop time from asking its questions.

She slipped into the pool. The water shocked her skin, and for a moment, everything was clear.