What the Riddle Asked

The sphinx of restaurant receipts — that's what Marie called the stack of paper on the kitchen counter. She'd been trying to reconcile six months of expenses since Arthur moved out, her fingers tracing the same lines over and again like a blind reader learning braille.

Her iPhone buzzed with a text from him: "Left my baseball glove in the closet. Can you bring it?"

She stared at the message. Six months, and he still thought she was his personal assistant. Six months since the miscarriage that had hollowed them both out, though they grieved differently. Arthur needed to run, to play softball with coworkers, to sweat through something he could control. Marie needed to count things, to organize what remained.

The goldfish bowl sat on the windowsill, its single inhabitant circling the glass castle in endless loops. People said goldfish had seven-second memories, but Marie knew better. This fish remembered when she fed it. It remembered the light. It just didn't have anything else to do but swim.

She opened the medicine cabinet and counted out her vitamins — D for the depression that had settled like winter fog, B-complex for the energy she couldn't summon, iron for the blood she'd lost. Each pill felt like a small surrender to the body that had betrayed her.

The baseball glove sat on the top shelf of the closet, leather worn soft where Arthur's palm had rested through hundreds of games. She remembered watching him play, the way he'd look up at the sky between pitches, as if checking for rain or seeking answers.

What was the riddle the sphinx asked? Something about what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. Marie had always wondered: what if the answer was "nothing"? What if the riddle itself was the point — that life asked questions it couldn't answer?

She messaged Arthur back: "It's in the mail."

Then she sat on the floor of the empty closet and wept for the first time in six months, the goldfish swimming its patient circles in the other room, all her vitamins in a neat row on the counter, her phone lighting up with his reply: "Thanks. I miss you sometimes."

She typed: "The riddle is the answer." Then deleted it and wrote: "Me too."