What the Sphinx Forgot to Ask

The eviction notice was taped to Mara's door when Elena arrived, a bright orange square that seemed to scream in the hallway's dim light. They'd given her friend three days to clear out the apartment she'd barely lived in—the cancer had moved faster than the lease.

Inside, the air still smelled like Mara's particular brand of clove cigarettes and vanilla candle wax, fighting a losing battle against mildew. Elena had promised Mara she'd handle this. She'd promised to hold it together. She was learning how to bear quite a lot of things lately: the silence of her own apartment, the way her phone stayed dark for days, the particular hollow ache of losing the only person who'd ever truly seen her.

On the kitchen counter, a small bowl contained a single goldfish, its scales the color of weak tea. Mara had named it Riddle, which was exactly the kind of pretentious bullshit she'd found charming. "Because goldfish have no memory," she'd said, pouring wine into mismatched glasses, "so every time I feed it, it's like meeting for the first time. No baggage. No past. Just the sphinx at dawn, born anew each morning."

Elena had rolled her eyes. "You're drunk."

"I'm philosophically intoxicated," Mara had corrected, tapping her glass against Elena's. "There's a difference."

Now Elena watched the fish drift through its tiny kingdom, mouth opening and closing in silent repetition. She wondered if Mara had been right about the forgetting. If the fish remembered the woman who'd fed it each morning, who'd pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the bowl after chemotherapy treatments, whispering promises she couldn't keep.

The sphinx had asked riddles, but the real question—why good things ended, why some people burned through life faster than others—went unanswered. Elena had learned to live inside the not-knowing. She netted the fish gently, placed it in a jar filled with tap water. She'd take it home. She'd feed it each morning and maybe, in the small ritual of sustenance, find something like prayer.

Outside, the winter sun hung low and pale. Elena walked to her car carrying the only part of Mara that still swam.