The Riddle Without Answer

The cat watched them from the windowsill—a sphinx, naked and imperious, its wrinkled skin gathering the afternoon light. Elena had brought it home three months ago, the same day Marcus moved out. She named it Riddle because something about its alien vulnerability reminded her of the questions she couldn't bring herself to ask anymore.

Now Riddle stared at the goldfish bowl on the counter, its tail twitching with something that looked like judgment. The goldfish—orange and stupidly resilient—circled its glass prison, mouth opening and closing in silent communication. Seven seconds, they said. That's all the memory a goldfish gets. Elena envied it. She would give anything to forget the way Marcus had looked at her when he said he wasn't sure he wanted children anymore, the way his eyes had slid away from hers toward the door, the keys, anywhere but her face.

The sphinx cat leaped from the sill and knocked against the bowl. Water sloshed. The goldfish darted, its seven-second memory reset, again and again and again.

"You're lucky," Elena whispered to the fish. "You don't have to remember."

Her phone buzzed. Marcus, again. Can we talk? Please.

She thought about the sphinx's riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? The answer was man—crawling, walking, leaning. But no one ever asked what happened after. When the third leg broke. When you couldn't get up at all.

The cat wound around her ankles, its skin warm against her bare feet, purring like a small engine. Elena looked at the goldfish, at her phone, at the empty half of the closet she still hadn't cleared.

Some riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some answers were just different forms of the same question, asked over and over in an endless loop, mouth opening and closing like a fish in a bowl, swimming toward nothing.

She deleted the text without reading it and went to feed the cat.