The Riddle of Silence

The Great Sphinx stared at her across three millennia of sand and silence, impassive as her ex-boyfriend had been that morning when she called to say she was leaving him. Maya ran her fingers through her hair—dark, tangled, smelling of airport shampoo and desert dust—and wished she could ravel it into something coherent, anything but the mess she'd made of her life.

Her iPhone buzzed in her pocket again. She knew who it was. The same name that had been lighting up her screen for days, a digital tether she kept meaning to cut. Instead, she watched the charging cable snake across the hotel room floor, a black umbilical connecting her to the wall socket, to the grid, to everything she was trying to escape.

"You're like the Sphinx," he'd told her once, drunk and earnest in that way that makes you forgive everything. "Riddles and secrets. I can never tell what you're thinking."

She'd laughed, cupping his face in her hands, her thumbs tracing the lines by his eyes. "Maybe you're not asking the right questions."

The cable frayed where it connected to the phone. She'd meant to replace it weeks ago. Some things you just let fall apart by inches, until they stop working entirely.

Outside, Cairo's nighttime neon smeared across the horizon like bruised water. She pressed her palm against the hotel window, feeling the vibration of the city below. The phone buzzed again, a third time, a fourth. She didn't pick up. Some riddles answer themselves if you wait long enough in the desert darkness with the ancient ones, those stone faces who'd seen everything and forgotten nothing, who knew that silence was the only question that mattered anyway.

She unplugged the cable from the wall. The screen went black. Finally, perfect silence.