The Riddle in the Bowl

The goldfish floated sideways in the bowl, its orange scales catching the morning light that filtered through the half-empty whiskey glass on the nightstand. Sarah hadn't even noticed it was dead until now.

"You're like a zombie," Marcus had told her last night, his voice cracking with that particular exhaustion that only comes after seven years of same arguments, same silences, same Sundays. "You're just going through the motions."

She wanted to argue, but she'd caught her own reflection in the bathroom mirror later—hollow eyes, skin the color of something that had been left out too long—and couldn't entirely disagree.

The dog, Buster, scratched at the back door. He was ancient now, his muzzle gray, his hips stiff. He still remembered the routines though: breakfast at six, walk at seven. Some things, unlike marriages, didn't require active maintenance to survive. They simply persisted.

Sarah sat at her desk, another Monday bleeding into another spreadsheet, another quarterly report that no one would read. Her phone lit up with a message from Marcus: *Can we talk?*

The riddle had been with her since she was a child: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The sphinx had asked Oedipus, and the answer—man—had saved his life but cost him his mother, his eyes, his peace. The sphinx had thrown herself from the cliff afterward, as if knowing the answer was worse than not knowing at all.

She typed *I don't know what's left to say* and deleted it three times before settling on *tonight*.

The goldfish had been a gift from Marcus three years ago, after her promotion—a celebration that now felt like a different lifetime. She'd forgotten to feed it for weeks at a time. It had kept swimming anyway, its three-second memory perhaps a blessing. Ignorance as survival strategy.

"Sarah?" Her manager stood in her doorway, looking concerned. "You've been staring at that screen for an hour."

"Just thinking about sphinxes," she said, and when he laughed, uncertain, she realized she'd spoken aloud.

That evening, she flushed the goldfish down the toilet. It felt like an ending, though she couldn't say what had begun. Buster watched from his bed, his tail thumping once, a slow recognition.

When Marcus came home, he found her sitting in the dark, waiting.

"I don't want to be a zombie," she said.

He nodded, sat beside her, and took her hand. "I know. Neither do I."

Outside, the sphinx remained silent, patient as ever, holding onto riddles that had answers, and those that never would.