The Sphinx in the Waiting Room

Maya sat in the oncologist's office, her fingers threading through the thinning hair that had fallen out in clumps over the past month. At forty-three, she'd imagined herself a redhead, not this copper-skulled creature staring back from the glass wall.

Across from her, an elderly man read a magazine, unconcerned. A silver fox, she thought — the kind her mother would've called handsome. He caught her eye and smiled, revealing something green stuck between his teeth. Spinach, at ten in the morning.

She almost laughed. Instead, she looked down at her hands, remembering last night's argument with Daniel.

"You're like the sphinx," he'd said, throwing up his hands. "You sit there with your riddles and your secrets, and I'm supposed to just—what? Guess what's inside?"

"I'm scared," she'd whispered. That was the riddle. The answer was so simple.

He'd left anyway.

The fox across the room cleared his throat. "Spinach," he said, tapping his front teeth. "From breakfast. My wife would be mortified."

"She doesn't have to know," Maya replied.

"She died seven years ago." His eyes crinkled. "But some habits, you keep them alive anyway."

The nurse called her name, but Maya lingered a moment longer.

"The sphinx," the old man said suddenly. "You know what she asked?"

Maya shook her head.

"'What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?' The answer was man — crawling, then walking upright, then with a cane." He gestured to his own trembling knee. "But I think the real question is: what do we become when the cane isn't enough?"

Maya stood up, her thin hair catching the fluorescent light. "We become something else," she said. "Something no riddle can capture."

She walked through the door, leaving the sphinx and her impossible riddle behind, stepping into whatever came next.