The Riddle in the Kitchen

Margaret stood at the counter at 2 AM, staring at a wilted bag of spinach like it held the answer to why David had stopped touching her three months ago. She squeezed the green leaves into a bowl, the tearing sound loud in the silence of their Brooklyn apartment. They'd bought the spinach together on Sunday, during their weekly ritual of pretending things were fine—buying ingredients for meals they'd eat separately, in shifts, like roommates who'd once promised each other forever.

The vitamin bottle sat on the windowsill where she'd left it that morning. Vitamin D. The doctor said her levels were catastrophically low, which explained the fatigue, the brain fog, the way she'd been moving through her days like a diver at the bottom of a swimming pool. David had started taking them too, a solidarity gesture that felt increasingly like mockery. She could hear him in the bedroom now, his breathing rhythmic and peaceful, while she stood in the kitchen making herself something nourishing, something green, something that said she was still trying.

A cat jumped onto the counter—their neighbor's Sphinx, hairless and alien-looking, with wrinkled skin that seemed to hold ancient wisdom. Margaret had started feeding it when David stopped asking about her day. The Sphinx regarded her with eyes the color of weak tea, as if it knew something she didn't.

"What are you looking at?" she whispered. The cat blinked, slow and deliberate.

The answer came to her suddenly, with the clarity that only arrives in sleeplessness: David wasn't coming back. Not really. The man who'd held her while she cried at her mother's funeral, who'd learned to make her grandmother's borscht recipe, who'd once driven six hours through a snowstorm just to bring her soup when she had the flu—that man had gradually, imperceptibly, become someone who shared her bed but not her life.

She pushed the spinach aside. She wanted something else. Something that wasn't good for her. Something that didn't feel like penance.

The Sphinx watched as she opened the freezer, took out the pint of chocolate ice cream she'd been hiding behind the frozen peas, and ate it straight from the container with the silver spoon her sister had given her at her wedding.

"Screw the spinach," she said.

For the first time in months, Margaret didn't feel like waiting for something to change.