The Sphinx of Cubicle 4B

The cat appeared on a Tuesday—the kind of gray, listless morning that made Mark want to disappear into the carpet. He'd been a zombie for three years now, since the merger, since Elena left. Six a.m. to eight p.m., fluorescent lights humming, spreadsheets multiplying like viruses.

The cat sat under the sphinx statue in the company courtyard—that pretentious limestone thing the CEO installed after his Egypt trip. "Guardian of riddles," he'd called it at the unveiling. Mark called it a paperweight.

The cat—a mangy calico with one ear missing—stared at him. Not a hungry stare. A challenge.

"What?" Mark muttered, cigarette burning between his fingers. He'd quit two years ago. Started again last month.

The cat didn't move.

Something tightened in Mark's chest. The sphinx loomed behind it, weathered limestone eroded by three years of indifference. The creature's missing nose seemed to mock him.

He thought of Elena's voice: "You used to have questions, Mark. What happened?"

The cat yawned, stretched, walked to Mark's feet, and rubbed its head against his ankle. Purred like a small engine waking up.

Mark hadn't been touched in six months. Not really. Handshakes, accidental bumps in the hallway. But nothing deliberate, nothing warm.

He dropped to his knees. The cat accepted his tentative scratches, leaning into his palm with an authority that made his throat tight.

"What are you still doing here?" he whispered. "Why haven't you run?"

The cat blinked slowly. Gold eyes that knew something.

The sphinx's question echoed in Mark's memory: *What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening?*

Man. The answer was always man.

But the real question was simpler: *What dies before it's dead?*

Mark had been dead for years. Living, but not alive.

He stood up, cat weaving through his legs. Dropped his cigarette, crushed it out. Checked his watch—7:58 a.m. Two minutes until the quarterly review where he'd present projections that didn't matter to people who wouldn't remember.

"Fuck it," Mark said.

He picked up the cat. It settled against his chest, purring.

Mark walked past the security guard—old Jerry, who nodded like he'd been expecting this. Out the glass doors. Past his car. To the bus stop heading toward the part of the city where rent was cheap and questions still mattered.

Behind him, the sphinx kept its secrets. The zombie woke up. And somewhere, a long way away, Elena might have felt something shift in the universe.

The cat purred louder. Mark laughed, surprised by the sound.

That was the real riddle, he realized. Not about walking on different numbers of legs.

It was this: *What must you lose before you can find what you already have?*