The Riddle of Wires

At 3 AM, Maya sat tangled in Ethernet cables, the server room's blue light washing over her face like a submarine's glow. Her vitamin D supplements sat on the desk—a tiny bottle of artificial sunlight for someone who hadn't seen the real thing in weeks.

Her phone buzzed. Jamie.

She hesitated. Three years of silence, and now he wanted to talk. The irony burned: she spent all day fixing strangers' internet connections, yet her own life's bandwidth was choked with things unsaid.

"You still have that sphinx tattoo?" he'd asked, drunk, the last time she saw him. His finger tracing the riddle inked on her shoulder: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man, but Jamie had laughed and said, "It's us."

Maya swallowed another vitamin. The bitterness grounded her.

She remembered Jamie's iPhone face-down on the bar, notifications from other women blooming like mushrooms in rain. She'd pretended not to notice. That was the problem with being the friend who listened—you learned to befriend your own erasure.

Now she stared at his name on her screen. The sphinx's riddle echoed: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? A man. But what walks on two legs until its heart breaks, then crawls?

She pressed decline.

The cables hummed. Somewhere, someone's connection would fail tonight. Somewhere, someone would wait for a call that never came. Maya unraveled a tangled knot of wires, her fingers steady, and kept working.