The Sphinx's Silence

She found him in the breakroom at 2 AM, staring at the goldfish bowl someone had left on the counter. The orange fish swam endless laps, never noticing the glass that contained it.

"Can't sleep?" she asked, though she already knew.

Tom's gray hair stood up where he'd been running his hands through it. He looked like someone who'd been solving equations in his head for hours.

"The sphinx riddle," he said, not looking at her. "What walks on four legs, then two, then three? Man. But what walks on two legs until it doesn't want to walk at all?"

She thought about the way he'd touched her palm at the holiday party, tracing her life line with practiced fingers. The lines didn't actually mean anything—they'd both taken that philosophy course freshman year—but he'd pretended they did. Some people liked believing in destiny because the alternative was admitting they'd made choices.

"The goldfish has better memory than people think," she said, watching the fish turn for the hundredth time. "Months, maybe years. It just pretends not to remember because remembering doesn't help it swim."

"Is that what we're doing?" Tom finally turned to her. His eyes had that look they got when he'd been staring at spreadsheets too long—the look that meant he was about to quantify something unquantifiable.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open. The breakroom flooded with sudden brightness, stark and unforgiving. For a second, she saw him as he was: tired, married to someone else, standing in a corporate breakroom at 2 AM pretending there was still a choice to make.

"The sphinx devoured anyone who couldn't answer," she said. "But maybe the real punishment was getting the answer right."

The fish swam on. The thunder rolled through. Tom's hair was thinning at the temples. Her palm still remembered the pressure of his fingers.

She left without saying goodbye. Some riddles solve themselves when you stop trying to answer them.