The Riddle of the Inning

The baseball arced toward the upper deck, a white comet against the twilight. Ellison watched it rise, same as he'd watched three marriages dissolve and two careers stutter to a halt. He was sixty-two, sitting alone in section 204, nursing a flat beer and the particular ache of a man who'd spent his life solving other people's problems but couldn't quite untangle his own.

The sphinx of the Egyptian wing had haunted him since his divorce—her limestone smile fixed, her riddles unanswered. What walks on four legs, then two, then three? He'd spent thirty years in HR arbitrating petty grievances and severance packages, but the business of living remained fundamentally insoluble.

"This seat taken?"

Ellison looked up. A woman, maybe forty, with the sort of face that had already begun to etch its disappointments into permanent lines. She held a program and a bear of a husband—no, the man beside her, burly and oblivious, was checking his phone.

"It's a free country," Ellison said.

She sat. They watched three pitches in silence.

"My father collected baseball cards," she said suddenly. "Had a '52 Mantle, mint condition. Sold it when my mother got sick. Worth a fortune now."

"Everything's worth something. Eventually."

"That's what I told myself when I let him go."

On the field, a batter struck out. The crowd groaned.

"The sphinx asks travelers a riddle," Ellison said, apropos of nothing. "Answer wrong, she eats you. Answer right, she destroys herself."

She turned to him, really looked at him. "Which one are we doing?"

He laughed, a rusty sound. "I'm still trying to figure out the question."

Below them, the bear of a husband noticed his wife was gone. He lumbered up the steps, already angry.

"That's him," she said, standing. "The riddle I never solved."

She walked down to meet him, and Ellison watched the baseball continue its indifferent orbit around the diamond. Some sphinxes, he realized, didn't ask riddles at all. They just waited, smiling, while you constructed your own cages.