The Riddle Under the Old Sphinx

Arthur sat on his porch, the baseball game droning on the radio—just background noise now, like the memory of hot summer days when he'd played catcher for the factory team. His grandson was out there right now, somewhere, wearing Arthur's old glove. That glove had caught more than baseballs. It had caught moments.

"You're being bull-headed again," Eleanor had told him forty years ago, just after he'd bought that angry red bull at auction. The animal had charged every fence post, every person, every shadow. "He just needs patience, Artie. Like some people I know."

She'd been right. The bull became their gentle giant, slobbering over Eleanor's gardenias while she sat beside the concrete sphinx she'd bought from a neighbor's estate sale. That sphinx, with its chipped nose and mysterious smile, had been her throne companion. She'd loved riddles—real ones and the kind life handed you.

"What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening?" she'd ask, smoothing the sphinx's weathered ear. The answer—humankind—had made her eyes shine with that particular wisdom that comes from watching seasons turn into decades.

Arthur's friend and neighbor, young Dave (only seventy, practically a spring chicken), had found another of Eleanor's riddles yesterday, tucked inside the sphinx's hollow base. Forty yellowed papers, each one a question she'd hidden before the cancer took her.

The latest one read: What lasts longer than marble but softer than breath?

Arthur watched the sunset paint the fields gold. The answer came to him as naturally as Eleanor's hand in his used to. Love. It wasn't stored in things, not even in the sphinx that guarded her garden. It was in how Dave still checked on him weekly. In how his grandson wore his old glove. In how the bull's grandson now grazed peacefully in the south pasture.

Arthur folded the paper and tucked it back into the sphinx. Some riddles answered themselves, given enough time.