The Sphinx Who Ate Oranges

Elara sat on her hotel balcony in Miami, the **cable** from her laptop stretched taut across the sliding door like a domestic barbed wire fence. She was forty-two, newly divorced, and supposed to be presenting at a tech conference tomorrow morning—her first big solo gig since David left.

Her phone buzzed. Another text from him: "I think the **orange** throw pillows are yours, but I'm keeping the coffee maker."

She stared at her open palm, the lines mapping a future she couldn't read. Some sphinx she was—unable to answer her own riddle. What do you give the woman who has everything but the one thing she actually wants?

"You're going to burn out that screen, too," said a voice from the next balcony.

Elara looked over. A man in his fifties, silver hair, cracking open a pistachio. His own laptop was closed.

"I'm working," she said, defensive.

"So was I. Fifteen years. Then my wife left with the **cable** guy—literally, the guy who ran our internet." He cracked the nut. "There's a joke there somewhere."

Elara found herself laughing, really laughing, for the first time in three months. "I'm Elara."

"Marcus."

They met at the hotel bar hours later. Marcus ordered an old fashioned; Elara, something with **orange** juice and bitterness.

"So what's your sphinx riddle?" he asked, nursing his drink. "The big one you can't solve."

Elara traced the condensation on her glass. "How to be whole when half of you is gone."

Marcus studied her for a long moment. "You know what they don't tell you about the sphinx? She didn't really care about the answers. She just wanted someone to stop running."

Elara felt something shift in her chest—the thing that had been frozen since David walked out. She reached out and covered Marcus's hand with hers, palm to palm, skin to skin. The simple electric shock of contact.

"I'm not running anymore," she said.

Outside, the Miami wind rustled the **palm** fronds. The **cable** to her laptop remained disconnected on the hotel room floor. The sphinx, it turned out, had been waiting all along for someone to simply sit with the questions.