The Vitamin Riddle

Maya counted out her morning regimen—Vitamin D for the bones she could feel hollowing, B-complex for the energy that never seemed to come, omega-3 for a heart that beat too fast when she thought about him. Thirty-nine, and already her body was becoming a stranger she had to negotiate with daily.

Her hair had started losing its argument with gray six months after David left. Now, at the bathroom mirror, she found herself pulling out silver strands like weeds from a garden she'd stopped tending. The plinking sound against the porcelain sink was a morning ritual, followed by the swallowing of pills that promised something she couldn't name.

"You're asking the wrong questions," her therapist had said last week, when Maya admitted she'd started wondering why David chose—of all people—someone who sold essential oils at farmer's markets. "The sphinx doesn't ask riddles to test you. It asks them to make you look closer at what you already know."

The sphinx. She'd looked it up later. A creature with the body of a lion, head of a human, wings of a bird. Guarding entrances, demanding answers. Devouring those who failed.

What was her sphinx? The bathroom mirror? The bottle of vitamins that cost more than her first car? Or David, still haunting her dreams with his particular brand of gentle cruelty—the way he'd touched her hair like it was something precious, then packed his things while she was at work?

Tonight, she took the vitamins without counting. Let the pills sort themselves out. She let her hair fall loose, silver and all. The riddle wasn't why he left. The riddle was why she was still waiting for an answer that would make sense of something that never had.

Outside her window, the city hummed its insistent question. Maya swallowed the last pill dry, turned off the light, and finally closed her eyes on the sphinx's watchful face, indifferent to her answers. Let it devour someone else tonight.