The Riddle at the Table

The dinner had been Claudia's idea—a reconciliation, she'd called it. Two years of silence over what exactly? A stolen promotion? A shared lover? The details blurred now, thick as cream sauce on stale bread.

Marcus watched Elena push spinach around her plate with surgical precision. She'd always been like this, even in college—performing indifference while calculating every angle. The cat that wound between their legs belonged to neither of them; it was a stray Elena had adopted, then neglected, then claimed to love desperately in turns.

"Remember Egypt?" Elena asked, her voice bright with false nostalgia. "That riddle the tour guide told us about the sphinx?"

Marcus did remember. They'd stood before the limestone creature, weathered and half-eroded, and the guide had explained how the Egyptians saw the sphinx as a guardian of knowledge, not a monster. Elena had rolled her eyes, whispered something about penis envy and phallic symbols. She couldn't let mystery exist without reducing it to something she could categorize and dismiss.

"The sphinx asks a riddle," Marcus said, cutting his steak. "Answer wrong, and you die."

"Or maybe," Elena said, setting down her fork, "the riddle is the point. Maybe dying's not the worst thing."

The cat jumped onto the table, knocking over a wineglass. Red spread across the white tablecloth like a map of something bleeding. Elena didn't move to stop it. She watched Marcus's reaction, measuring something.

"You were going to tell me why we're here," Marcus said.

"I'm dying." The words came out flat, no drama. "Six months, maybe a year. Pancreatic cancer."

The spinach on Elena's plate suddenly seemed obscene. Marcus opened his mouth, closed it. The friend he'd spent two years resenting, the rival he'd mentally defeated a hundred times in imagined arguments—she was just a person, sitting in his kitchen, dying.

"I don't want your forgiveness," she said. "I just wanted to know if you'd still feed me."

Outside, rain began to fall. The cat settled on the table between them, tail twitching, and Marcus thought: the sphinx's riddle wasn't about knowledge at all. It was about whether you could look at something half-eroded, weathered by time and betrayal, and still call it beautiful.

He pushed his plate toward her. "Take the rest," he said. "I'm not hungry anymore."