What the Sphinx Knows

She sat on the bench at O'Hare, her iPhone screen cracked but still glowing with his last message—sent three days before he died. *I'll explain everything when I get back.* The cursor blinked like a heartbeat that refused to stop.

Across from her, a man ate papaya with surgical precision, the fruit's orange flesh bright against the airport's sterile gray. He caught her staring and offered a sad smile. 'My wife loved this stuff. Got it for her every Sunday morning.' He held up a plastic fork. 'She's gone now. Seven months Tuesday.'

She nodded. 'I'm sorry.' What else was there to say?

'Married thirty-eight years,' he continued, seemingly unable to stop. 'You'd think I'd know her. But I found letters after—things she never told me. Secrets she carried like stones in her pockets.' He gestured toward his phone. 'And then there's all this—technology that lets us reach anyone, anywhere, and we still end up alone.'

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, rain streaked the glass like tears refusing to fall. Water pooled on the tarmac where aircraft once moved like metal beasts.

Her phone chimed—a memory notification. *Three years ago today: Cubs game.* She remembered that night, Wrigley Field alive with the roar of baseball fans, the summer air thick with beer and possibility. He'd held her hand during the seventh inning stretch and whispered, 'This is what happiness feels like.' She'd believed him. She'd believed that happiness was something you could hold, keep, carry forward.

'You know what they say about the Great Sphinx,' the man said suddenly, surprising her. 'It's a riddle without an answer. A question carved in limestone that's eroded for五千 years and still keeps its secrets.' He laughed bitterly. 'Like people, really. You can spend a lifetime beside someone and never know what they're hiding.'

She looked at her phone again. *I'll explain everything.* What had he meant? The affair? The debt? Or something smaller—some ordinary disappointment he'd never found the right moment to confess?

The gate agent announced her flight. Final call.

The man stood, brushing crumbs from his shirt. 'Good luck with your riddles,' he said softly. 'Whatever they are.'

She boarded the plane, leaving behind the papaya-eating stranger, the rainy tarmac, the unanswered message. As the aircraft lifted above the clouds, she understood: some sphinxes don't ask questions. Some just keep their secrets in stone, waiting for the erosion that eventually comes for us all.