The Riddle of Wellness

The sphinx had been staring at Elena for three weeks now—a life-sized fiberglass replica perched absurdly atop the vitamin display at Whole Health. She worked the graveyard shift stocking supplements, listening to the hum of refrigerators and the occasional distant siren. At 3 AM, the sphinx's painted grin seemed to mock her.

"You look like shit," her manager had said earlier that day. "Take some vitamins. They're free for employees."

She had laughed bitterly. Elena knew exactly what was in those bottles. Mostly fillers, mostly placebo, mostly hope compressed into gelatin capsules. She'd been taking them for months anyway—D3 for the seasonal depression that started when Marcus left, B-complex for energy she couldn't summon, magnesium for sleep that wouldn't come.

Her phone buzzed. Marcus. Again.

*Can we talk? I'm worried about you.*

Elena stared at the message until the screen dimmed. Worried. He was worried now. Three months of silence, and suddenly he was worried. She remembered the last time she'd seen him—packing boxes in their apartment, his new girlfriend waiting downstairs in a Volkswagen. The girlfriend who had a dog. Some rescue thing with anxious eyes and a trembling tail. Elena had wanted to hate that dog, but it had looked at her with such naked need that she'd felt something crack open in her chest.

The sphinx seemed to lean forward. *What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?*

The classic riddle. Man. Crawling as infant, walking as adult, leaning on cane in old age. But Elena had a different answer: *Grief.* It crawls through you at first, then walks beside you, then you learn to lean on it because it's the only thing that remembers who you used to be.

She unlocked her phone and typed: *I'm fine. Don't worry about me.*

Then she deleted it and typed: *I'm starting over. I think that's what you wanted, right?*

Deleted that too.

Instead, she grabbed a bottle of Vitamin D from the shelf—expired inventory she was supposed to discard—and slipped it into her pocket. Let the sphinx judge her. Let the fluorescent lights expose her petty theft. Outside, a dog barked in the distance, lonely and persistent, and Elena finally understood the riddle she'd been living inside.

The sphinx wasn't asking about legs. It was asking about what you lose along the way, and what you become when you've given away all the pieces of yourself you can afford to lose.

She walked out into the cold dawn air,维生素 bottle warm against her hip, and for the first time in months, she didn't feel like answering to anyone at all.