What the Sphinx Knows

The apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distinctive, rhythmic scratch of our cat, Barnaby, grooming himself in the hallway. He was the only one sleeping peacefully.

"You're still going?" Marcus asked from the bedroom doorway, his silhouette framed by the amber glow of the hallway light. He hadn't bothered to turn on the lamp.

"It's my Tuesday night," I said, smoothing my swimsuit in the bathroom mirror. My swimsuit—that word felt foreign now, like a relic from a different marriage. "The pool closes at eleven."

"Right. Your swimming." He said it like it was an affliction. "Like you're trying to drown yourself in slow motion."

I didn't answer. At the community center, the night guard waved me through with the familiarity of someone who'd seen me every week for six months. The pool was empty—chlorine-scented silence, the water a dark blue mirror under fluorescent lights.

I slipped into the water and began my laps. Breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle. Counting strokes like counting the days since Marcus had really looked at me, since he'd asked anything that wasn't logistical or critical. Our marriage had become something else entirely—a routine of parallel lives, a series of unasked questions.

Barnaby knew. Animals always do. He'd taken to sleeping on Marcus's pillow during the day, as if marking territory that no longer felt like mine. At night, he'd sit in the doorway between us, golden eyes taking in everything, saying nothing.

A sphinx, I thought, surfacing for air. We'd spent our honeymoon in Egypt, climbing inside the Great Pyramid, standing before the Sphinx at dawn. Marcus had recited the riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? We'd laughed then, tangled together in cheap hotel sheets, thinking the answer was simply: a man through his life.

But the real answer—the one they didn't tell you in mythology class—was something else. The riddle wasn't about how you walk through your life. It was about who you become while no one is watching.

I touched the pool's edge, breathing hard. Marcus was a sphinx now—all inscrutable surfaces, all unasked questions. And I was swimming laps in the dark, trying to stay afloat in waters I'd never agreed to enter.

Barnaby would be waiting when I returned. He always did. Some creatures knew that the only way to survive was to keep watching, to keep waiting, to never look away.