What the Sphinx Forgot

The lightning strike had split the ancient oak in half when Maya was seven. Thirty years later, the scarred trunk still stood in her mother's backyard—a monument to destruction that refused to fall.

Maya sat on the porch with James, the friend she'd slept with exactly once, in a moment of grief-soaked weakness after her father's funeral. Three months had passed, and whatever had sparked between them that night had cooled into something safer, something that could be named without embarrassment.

"Your mother asked about you," James said, lighting a cigarette with practiced hands. Maya watched the smoke curl upward, dissolving into the humid evening air.

"She means well."

"She means to marry you off to her dentist's son. There's a difference."

Maya laughed, surprising herself. A fox darted through the overgrown garden at that moment, its russet coat catching the last light. It paused near the split oak, watching them with intelligent eyes before vanishing beneath the hydrangeas.

"Did you know foxes mate for life?" Maya said.

"Is that a fact?"

"No. I just made it up. But it sounds like something that should be true."

James exhaled smoke. "Everything worth believing was made up by someone."

Later, after he left, Maya found herself walking to the oak tree. In the center of the split trunk, someone had carved something decades ago—a crude sphinx, its weathered face mostly eroded by rain and time. She'd never noticed it before, or perhaps she had, as a child, and forgotten.

The sphinx had no riddles left. Whatever wisdom it once guarded had washed away in the years of storms, the countless lightning strikes that had missed but shaped the sky nonetheless.

Maya touched the worn stone with her fingertips. Her mother would sell the house soon. James would drift into whatever life people like him made—steady, domestic, eventually someone's husband. The fox would find another garden.

Some endings were not catastrophes. Some were simply weather.