The Unanswered Riddle

The coaxial cable lay severed across the floor, a silver snake struck dead in the middle of Sarah's living room. She hadn't meant to pull it loose, but grief made you clumsy in ways you never expected.

"You should come over," David had said three weeks ago, before the accident. "I finally got HBO. We can watch that new documentary about Egypt."

Now she sat on his couch, surrounded by boxes that held forty-seven years of a life cut short. His golden retriever, Moses, rested his head on her knee, his brown eyes old and swimming with cataracts. The dog had stopped eating two days ago.

Sarah found the photograph in a shoebox: David, age twenty-five, standing before the Great Sphinx, arms raised like a prophet conjuring miracles. The riddle of the Sphinx—what walks on four legs, then two, then three—had always made him laugh. "The answer's just time," he'd say, pouring another drink. "Time happens to you, and then you need a cane."

She'd been his friend for thirty years, through two divorces and a career collapse, through his mother's long decline and his own brief, terrifying battle with cancer that they thought he'd won. They'd never been lovers, though there were moments—drunk nights, lonely holidays—when the line between them had grown thin enough to blur.

Now she was the executor of an estate that felt incomprehensibly light. David had died with less than he'd started with, having spent his last decade giving things away: books to libraries, money to nephews, time to anyone who needed it.

Moses whined softly. Sarah stroked his ears, feeling the thin papery skin of a dog who'd outlived his purpose.

"I know," she said. "I don't know what to do either."

The cable could be reconnected. The dog would need to be put down soon. The boxes could be donated. But the thing that walked on four legs, then two, then three—that ancient, patient mystery—had taken another friend, and left her standing in the empty room, somehow surprised by the ending even though they'd all known it was coming.