The Riddle of June

The pool had sat stagnant since the funeral, three months of algae turning the water into something resembling pea soup. Elena stood at the edge, her dog Buster pressing his warm flank against her leg, whining softly as if he understood the weight of this place.

She'd been running from this conversation since she was seventeen. Her mother's voice echoed from the patio: "Eat your spinach, El. It'll put hair on your chest." The same spinach grew wild in the garden now, gone to seed, ironic in its stubborn persistence.

The sphinx of Elberton's estate—her father's pretentious acquisition from some bankrupt European collection—stared across the yard with limestone eyes. He'd bought it the year he stopped coming home. The year the pool became her mother's entire world.

"Mom's idea of a riddle," Elena said aloud. "Three months later and I still don't know the answer."

Buster barked once, sharp and questioning.

"You're right, buddy. Not everything needs solving." She'd been running for thirty-three years, from this house, from the truth, from the pool where her father'd taught her to swim and then, later, where she'd found her mother floating face-down in the shallow end.

The coroner called it accidental. Elena had never asked about the empty bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet.

She knelt by the pool's edge, dipping her hand into the murky water. Something brushed against her fingers—maybe a frog, maybe memory. Buster nudged her shoulder, and she leaned into him, letting the truth settle in her chest like the spinach her mother had insisted would make her strong.

Some sphinxes didn't need answers. Some pools weren't meant to be drained. Some deaths—she pressed her forehead to the dog's neck—some deaths were just questions you learned to live alongside, like the ache of a phantom limb.

Elena stood, bones creaking in the June humidity. "Okay," she said to the sphinx, to the pool, to the ghost of a woman who'd never stopped running from herself. "Okay."