What the Sphinx Asks

The cat watched from the windowsill—Elias's cat, technically, though I'd been feeding her longer than he had.

I met Mark at a grief support group, two months after Elias died from the pancreatic cancer that had turned him into a human riddle. That last month, he'd become a sphinx of sickness, skin stretched thin over ancient secrets, eyes holding questions I couldn't answer. "Why me?" he'd ask, and I'd have nothing. "What comes next?" And I still had nothing.

Mark was different. He had a dog—a droopy-eyed golden retriever named Buster who greeted everyone with the same desperate enthusiasm, as if each visitor might finally, finally be the one to stay. Mark poured me a whiskey the third time we met. His apartment smelled like wet dog and old books.

"I don't do pets," I told him, watching Buster dismantle a slipper with terrifying focus.

"Everyone does pets," Mark said. "They just choose them differently."

He was right, I realized later, naked in his bed while Buster snored from the hallway. Some people chose companions that asked nothing. Elias had wanted a cat—aloof, observant, judgment in purring form. Mark wanted unconditional devotion, a creature who would love him even if he was unlovable.

"I keep dreaming about him," I confessed to Mark at 3 AM, the city humming outside his window. "The cat hates me for it. I can feel her judgment from the other room."

"Get rid of the cat," Mark said.

"I can't."

"Then you're not ready."

We broke up two weeks later. He adopted another dog. I kept the cat, who finally deigned to sleep on my feet three months in, her weight a small, judgmental anchor.

Sometimes I think about what the sphinx asked Oedipus: what walks on four legs, then two, then three? The answer was man. But no one mentioned the fourth stage—the part where you learn to live with the weight of everything you almost became.

The cat is purring now. I'm considering a dog.