The Sphinx's Silent Question

The sphinx in the corporate lobby had always unsettled Maya — its brass eyes following her as she hurried to her desk on the fourth floor, carrying the same papaya she ate every morning since the funeral. It was her mother's fruit, sweet and musky, a ritual of grief that had calcified into habit over three years.

She'd become a zombie of her own making. Up at 6:30, same train, same coffee, same meetings where words floated like debris in stagnant water. Even her divorce had been bloodless, a bureaucratic amputation performed with polite efficiency. She was thirty-four and felt like she'd already lived the life she'd die in.

Then came the new director of communications, Elias, with his terrible ties and his obsession with his goldfish pond. He kept photos of them on his desk — fantails with veiled eyes, swaying in water dyed blue with algae treatments. "They remember everything," he told her once, leaning against her cubicle wall. "Three seconds, that's the lie. They remember."

"You running today?" he asked, not looking up from his fish photos.

"Always running," she said, and meant it.

The sphinx watched as she began leaving work at 5:00 PM sharp, changing into running shoes in the lobby bathroom. She ran until her lungs burned, past the same papaya stand where the vendor winked at her, past the goldfish pond in the park where Elias fed them every evening. He was there tonight, scattering flakes while shadows lengthened.

"Zombie mode off," he said, reading her somehow.

She stopped running, stood beside him, watched orange tails flash through dark water.

"The sphinx," she said suddenly. "In the lobby. It asks nothing, but I feel like I've been answering riddles my whole life."

Elias turned, his face creased with something like understanding. "Maybe that's the riddle. Why we keep answering when no one's asking."

The papaya in her bag had bruised against her keys. Later, they would sit on his couch and feed each other the sweet, soft fruit with their fingers, and she would tell him about her mother, and he would show her the scars on his arms from a decade of cutting, and the sphinx would be just a brass statue in an empty lobby.

But for now, Maya stood by the pond, goldfish breaking the surface, finally not running.