The Sphinx by the Pool

The pool at the Ramada was empty, which was how Elena liked it. Fifty years old and she still swam every morning at dawn, before the business travelers descended and turned the water into a churning froth of backstroke ambitions and casual networking.

Her hair had started coming out in clumps three months ago. The doctors said stress, said peri-menopause, said it might grow back, might not. Elena had taken shears to it herself, standing in her bathroom mirror at 2 AM, watching the gray-brown strands fall like dead leaves. Now she was bald as a sphinx, smooth and terrible and free.

"You look like a different person," her husband had said that morning, not looking up from his coffee.

"I am," she'd replied.

She slipped into the pool. The water was shocking, perfect. She'd been swimming since she was a girl growing up in Phoenix, when her mother would drive her to the community center before dawn. Her mother was gone now—pancreatic cancer, fast and cruel—but Elena still felt her in the water, that particular way of moving through space, cutting through resistance.

A sphinx moth fluttered near the pool light, its wings an elegant blur. She watched it land on the concrete edge, vibrating with that intense, fragile life that things with wings always seemed to possess.

She'd met Richard at a pool party, twenty-seven years ago. He'd been wearing a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt and he'd made a joke about synchronized swimming that actually made her laugh. Now he slept in the guest room and they were polite to each other and she swam every morning while he slept.

The moth took flight again, disappearing into the predawn gray. Elena dove underwater, holding her breath until her lungs burned, surfacing gasping, alive. The hotel room was silent when she returned. Richard's breathing was even and innocent from the guest bed. She showered, dressed, packed her bag.

At the door, she paused. The sphinx moth waited on the threshold, regarding her with compound eyes.

"I know," she whispered. "The riddle isn't the point."

She left without waking him, driving north as the sun crested the desert horizon, her hand touching the smooth skin of her skull where her hair used to be, feeling entirely new.