The Sphinx's Last Riddle

Every morning, Elena becomes a sphinx. She sits at the kitchen table, unmoving, inscrutable, her face an enigma I've spent seven years failing to solve. The coffee steams between us, a ritual as mechanical as breathing.

She sorts her vitamins into precise little piles—D for the darkness she carries, B-complex for the energy she lost somewhere between our fifth anniversary and last winter's first snowfall. I watch her swallow them with the same practiced efficiency she applies to our marriage: necessary maintenance of a structure long past its prime.

Barnaby, our ancient golden retriever, presses his arthritic body against my leg. He's the only one who still touches either of us with any tenderness. His cloudy eyes track Elena's movements with a devotion she stopped reciprocating somewhere around month six of her mother's decline.

"The test came back positive," she says, not looking up.

The sphinx speaks. I wait for the riddle.

"Cancer. Stage three."

Her vitamin ritual continues. Calcium now, for bones that will soon need more strength than supplements can provide.

I think about the sphinx's ancient riddle: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was always man—crawling infancy, upright adulthood, the cane of old age. But the real answer, I realize now, is simpler: we break. In stages. In predictable, inevitable stages.

Barnaby whines, sensing the shift in air pressure that accompanies all catastrophes. I rest my hand on his head, finding comfort in the only living thing that still needs me.

"I've already scheduled the surgery," Elena says, her voice flat. "I don't expect you to stay."

The vitamins are organized by color now. White for pain, pink for nausea, amber for the appetite she'll lose. She's planning the geography of her suffering with the same precision she once applied to our wedding seating chart.

I look at this woman I married, this sphinx who's finally revealed her riddle: what creature loves only when the ending is certain?

I push back my chair. The sound scrapes loud against the silence.

Barnaby struggles to his feet, following me.

"I'm not leaving," I say, and the sphinx's face cracks open, revealing something terrified and human beneath the mystery. "But I'm going to put on coffee. The good kind."

Her vitamin piles wait, but for the first time in months, she doesn't reach for them first.