The Riddle of Departure

The papaya sat on the counter, a sunset sphere she'd sliced open two hours ago. Its flesh had softened into something pitiable, like their marriage that last year—not rotten exactly, just past the point of redemption. He watched the juice pool on the marble, thinking about riddles.

"The sphinx asks," she had said, the night before she left, "what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three at dusk?" She'd been quoting mythology from that audiobook, the one she listened to during her commute. "But the real riddle isn't the answer. The real riddle is why we think it matters at all."

He pressed the iphone against his temple, its black mirror cool against skin that had forgotten her warmth. Five unread messages from his mother. Two from his boss. One from a number he didn't recognize—probably the wrong number that had texted him last week: *is this the guy?* The uncertainty gnawed at him, a persistent itch of curiosity he couldn't quite resolve.

The papaya's seeds formed a perfect geometric pattern, like some ancient cosmological map. He wondered if riddles were just questions without answers, designed to make people feel stupid about not knowing things nobody actually knew. His wife had always loved puzzles, those plastic interlocking things she'd spread across the coffee table while he watched basketball. She said they made her feel like she was solving something, putting pieces together until chaos transformed into order.

Now chaos just was.

The sphinx, if it existed, would probably ask: What creature builds towers of glass and wire, then forgets how to talk to the person sleeping beside him? What creature creates devices to connect, then uses them to disappear?

He ate a piece of papaya. It was sweet, almost too sweet, the kind of sweetness that makes your teeth ache. Somewhere in Egypt, tourists were taking selfies with stone lions that had outlasted entire civilizations. Somewhere, his wife might be eating breakfast with someone who appreciated riddles.

The phone lit up. *Are you still coming to dinner?*

He typed: *No.*

Then deleted it. Typed: *I forgot.*

Deleted that too.

The papaya seeds stared back at him, dozens of tiny black eyes. He put them in the trash, washed the plate, and wondered what the sphinx would make of a creature who could walk away but chose to stay in a kitchen that had stopped feeling like home three papayas ago.