The Riddle at the Table

The cat watched from the countertop, tail twitching with judgment, as Mara pushed the spinach around her plate. It had been three hours since David said anything that wasn't a monosyllable. He sat across from her, phone glowing in his hand, eyes glazed—the corporate zombie he'd become somewhere between the promotion and the mortgage.

"Egypt," he said suddenly, not looking up. "For our anniversary. There's a package deal."

Mara stared at him. Seven years of marriage reduced to a package deal, as if their love could be bundled with airport transfers and buffet breakfasts. "You want to see the sphinx?"

"It's iconic." Still scrolling. "People do it for the 'gram."

The cat leapt down, claws clicking on the floor, and wound between David's legs. He didn't notice.

Mara thought about riddles and ancient stone, about creatures who asked questions and devoured those who couldn't answer. What was the riddle of their marriage? When did the man who once wrote her poems in the margins of textbooks become this hollow thing, this animated corpse who remembered their anniversary only when his calendar app pinged him?

"David." Her voice sounded foreign in her own apartment. "Do you even like spinach?"

He finally looked up. "What?"

"You bought it. You keep buying it. But I'm the only one who eats it. You said you hated it when we met."

David blinked, as if waking from a long sleep. "I don't know. It's healthy. It's what adults eat."

Mara stood up, her chair scraping violently against the floor. "That's it, isn't it? You've been playing adult. You've been playing husband. But somewhere along the way, you forgot how to be you."

The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating. Outside, a siren wailed—a modern lament.

"I don't know what you want me to say," David whispered.

"The truth," she said. "For once in your life, give me the answer to the riddle."

The cat bumped against her shin, purring, as if urging: *Ask the real question.*

Mara looked at this man she loved, this stranger across the table, and realized the sphinx's riddle wasn't about him at all. It was about her. What walks on four legs in the morning of marriage, two at noon, and collapses under its own weight by nightfall?

"Do you still love me?" she asked.

David's phone screen went dark. His eyes filled with something that looked like fear, or maybe recognition. "I don't know how to find out anymore."

The cat jumped back onto the counter, satisfied. The spinach went cold on both their plates. Outside, the city kept moving, full of people sleepwalking through lives they'd chosen but forgotten how to inhabit. Mara sat back down. They would start there—in the wreckage, with the truth. Some riddles, she realized, don't have answers. They only have the asking.