The Sphinx of June

The first papaya I'd eaten in six months sat uneaten on my desk, its flesh weeping onto the paper plate. Marcus had brought it, bright as a wound, because he remembered everything. Even the things I wished he'd forget.

You look like a zombie, Elena said from my doorway. She was my oldest friend, which meant she was licensed to say the terrible things. Creative burnout, she'd called it, but we both knew the truth. I'd stopped writing the day the check from my father cleared, six months of severance for the daughter who wouldn't stay in the family business.

The bull died yesterday, Elena said. Your father's prize breeding bull. Heart attack in the field.

I should have felt something. Grief, or relief, or even the bitter satisfaction of comeuppance. Instead I felt nothing at all. Just the vast, hollow space where my fury used to live.

He wants to see you, Elena said. At the sphinx exhibit. That new installation downtown.

The sphinx. A creature that asked impossible questions and devoured those who couldn't answer. My father had funded the exhibition—a testament to the family legacy, to the kind of riddles money couldn't solve.

I found him standing before the fiberglass monument, smaller than I remembered. His back was to me, shoulders curved inward like parentheses around something unsaid. He didn't turn when I approached.

She would have been thirty today, he said.

My mother. Dead twenty years, and still the axis around which we both spun, two planets caught in each other's gravity, unable to escape or collide.

The papaya Marcus brought was still on my desk when I returned to my apartment. Sweet, soft, forbidden fruit—the kind that stains everything it touches. I ate it standing at the window, watching the city move through its evening rhythms, and for the first time in months, something inside me began to wake up.