The Riddle of Empty Rooms

Sheila stood in the kitchen at 11:47 PM, peeling an orange. The citrus scent cut through the stale air of their marriage—three years of accumulated silences and unspoken grievances. In the bedroom, David lay sleeping, or pretending to. He'd become a zombie of his former self since the layoff, moving through rooms with the hollow-eyed shuffle of the walking dead, leaving crumbs of his former wit and warmth in his wake.

Their bedroom had become her personal sphinx, presenting riddles she couldn't solve: Why did the man who once wrote her poems now flinch at her touch? What died between them—love, or just the energy to perform it? She'd pose questions across the dinner table, but he'd answer in grunts, in half-shrugs, in the strategic application of headphones.

The orange's skin tore away in strips, releasing small bursts of essential oil into the fluorescent-lit darkness. She remembered how he used to peel them for her, making stupid sphinx jokes—"What fruit is riddled with mystery? This one, because I can't figure out its secrets." Now he couldn't riddle his way out of a paper bag.

"Zombie" was what her sister called David. "He's not dead, Sheila, but he's not alive either. You're married to a ghost." Sheila had defended him then. Now she wasn't so sure.

She ate a segment. Sour, sweet, impossibly alive. The juice ran down her chin. In the other room, David shifted, making a sound that might have been pain or might have been dreams.

The sphinx had asked its final question: Stay or go? The answer sat in her sticky hands, in the smell of citrus cutting through decay, in the realization that the living should not spend their days haunting rooms with the dead.

She wiped her chin. She'd pack in the morning. Some riddles solve themselves when you finally stop asking.