What the Sphinx Already Knew

Elena watched Daniel across the dinner table, his face illuminated by the glow of his iPhone, that third wheel in every modern marriage. She'd made spinach lasagna—his favorite, or at least it had been, once. Now he picked at it, his thumb scrolling through emails while their aging golden retriever, Buster, rested his chin on Daniel's knee, begging for scraps that never came.

"You're quiet," Daniel said, finally looking up. He had that sphinx-like quality she'd fallen for—inscrutable, beautiful, maddening. A riddle she'd spent seven years trying to solve.

"I'm thinking about the game," she said. "Last night's."

"The baseball thing?" He frowned. "You hate baseball."

"My father loved it." She pushed food around her plate. "He took me to a Giants game when I was eight. Bought me a foam finger, let me keep score. He told me baseball was the only sport where the defense controls the ball. He said that made it like life—you're always reacting to what comes at you, and sometimes you strike out looking."

Daniel set down his phone. "Elena, what is this?"

"The sphinx asked a riddle," she said, surprised by her own calm. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. The answer was man. But nobody asks what the sphinx felt like, knowing the answer and asking anyway. Waiting for someone to finally get it right—or finally accepting they never would."

Buster whined, sensing something shift in the room.

"Elena—"

"I found the messages," she said. "I'm not asking for the riddle anymore, Daniel. I'm asking if you even want to solve it."

His phone chimed. They both looked at it, that small bright screen, then at each other across a table that suddenly seemed miles wide. Outside, a dog barked in the distance—that neighbor's beagle, lonely and persistent. The spinach congealed on their plates.

"I don't know," Daniel said finally. And that was the truth, at least.

The sphinx had jumped, after all. But not from the cliff. From the question itself.