The Riddle of the Mirror

The scissors slid through her hair with a terrible finality. Three feet of dark silk fell to the bathroom tile—black snakes coiling around the base of the sink. Elena stared at her reflection, the woman in the mirror suddenly foreign to her. At forty-two, with the promotion she'd sacrificed everything for finally within reach, she'd decided to cut off the one thing her ex-husband had claimed to love most about her.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. David.

"The sphinx has no secrets," he'd told her once, drunk on expensive scotch at the office holiday party three years ago. "Everything shows eventually."

She should have known then. The riddle wasn't what walked on four legs then two then three—it was what happened when you finally stood on your own two feet and realized you'd built everything on someone else's foundation.

Elena walked into the kitchen. On the counter, the papaya she'd bought yesterday sat in a ceramic bowl, its skin mottled with yellow and orange like a bruise ripening into forgiveness. She sliced it open. The scent hit her—musky, tropical, incongruous in her gray Chicago winter. The black seeds inside stared back like tiny eyes.

She ate a slice. Sweet, faintly fermenting. It tasted like the vacation they'd never taken, the life they'd stopped building years before the papers were signed.

Her hair lay in piles on the floor, dark circles on white tile. She thought about Oedipus, about how the sphinx's riddle destroyed her but also cleared the way for him to become king. Sometimes destruction was its own answer.

The phone buzzed again. Probably David, wanting to know why she'd left the meeting early. Probably HR, wanting to discuss the "concerning behavior" several coworkers had reported—her crying in the supply closet, her arriving with red-rimmed eyes, her unprecedented errors on the Anderson account.

She ate another slice of papaya, letting the juice run down her chin. Tomorrow she'd go into work, chopped hair and all. Tomorrow she'd explain to HR that her mother had died suddenly. Tomorrow she'd apologize for the lapse in professionalism. Tomorrow she'd be exactly who they needed her to be.

But tonight, she would sit in her bathroom with the lights off, eating papaya in the dark, and she would not answer the riddle. She would simply let the sphinx wait.