The Sphinx in Her Palm

Eleanor sat on her screened porch, the morning light filtering through the fronds of her forty-year-old palm tree, watching her vitamin tablets settle in the little porcelain dish her daughter had sent. "For your health, Mama," the note had said. At eighty-two, health had become a daily negotiation with her own body.

She picked up the small brass sphinx her husband Henry had brought home from Egypt in 1973, before they were even married. He'd found it in a dusty market in Cairo, told the vendor it reminded him of her—mysterious and timeless. She'd laughed then, young and certain of everything. Now, holding the cool metal in her palm, she understood what he'd meant. A life becomes a riddle only after you've lived enough of it to wonder what it means.

The palm reader at the county fair that same year had traced the lines on her hand and promised a long life, many children, great love. She'd paid two dollars and dismissed it as carnival nonsense. Yet here she was: five children, twelve grandchildren, three years widowed, still tracing the same lines on her palm that the fortune teller had studied half a century ago.

Her granddaughter Mia was coming today. Eleanor had something to give her—not the brass sphinx, though Mia admired it whenever she visited. Not the vitamins, though Mia always reminded her to take them. She was giving her the leather-bound journal where she'd written down everything: the recipe for Henry's favorite stew, the way her mother taught her to mend a tear, the words she'd whispered to each of her children in the dark when nightmares came.

"Legacy," Eleanor whispered, rolling the word like a marble in her mouth. It wasn't monuments or money. It was the palm pressed against your cheek, the voice that said "you can," the small brass mysteries carried from one hand to another.

She swallowed her vitamins, picked up her pen, and began to write.