The Riddle of Us

The papaya sat untouched on the breakfast tray, its flesh the color of a sunset we'd stopped watching together. Martin stared at the fruit as if it were a sphinx—some ancient, silent riddle he couldn't solve anymore. Across the small table, Elena moved her coffee cup in slow, deliberate circles. The cable news droned on about a recession neither of them could feel anymore.

"You used to eat them," she said, not looking up. "In Bali. You said they tasted like possibility."

"I don't remember Bali," Martin lied. He remembered everything—the papaya juice dripping down her wrist, the way salt water had dried in her hair like crystals, the hotel room where they'd whispered promises into each other's skin. But remembering required feeling, and feeling required energy he'd stopped possessing three promotions ago.

They'd come to this resort on a borrowed credit card, one last attempt to resuscitate something that had been brain-dead for years. The concierge had called it a "rekindling package." Martin called it hospice.

He stood up and crossed to the window. Below, the infinity pool gleamed like something out of a magazine he'd never read. Couples moved through the water in synchronized patterns, their laughter floating up like ghosts.

"We're like zombies," Martin said, the words escaping before he could catch them. "We're just going through the motions. Eating. Sleeping. Pretending this isn't rotting from the inside."

Elena finally looked at him, and the terrible thing was that he couldn't read her expression anymore. Had there been a time when he could read her like a book? When her silence spoke paragraphs he understood?

"The sphinx ate everyone who couldn't answer," she said quietly. "But maybe the riddle was never supposed to be solved. Maybe some things just stay silent."

Martin pressed his forehead against the glass. The cable box blinked its single red light in the corner, counting down something—minutes, dollars, chances they'd already used up.

"I think," Elena said, standing up, "that I'm going to go lie by the pool. Alone."

She didn't invite him. She didn't slam the door. She just walked out, leaving Martin with his papaya and his sphinx and his cable television, all the questions he'd stopped asking years ago finally catching up to him in a room that cost more per night than he'd made in his first year out of college. The possibility he'd once tasted had finally gone rotten.