What the Sphinx Knows

The cabin sat three yards from the river's edge, where water churned against rocks in that relentless way time has of wearing everything down eventually. Clara stood on the porch with her wine, watching the sphinx moth batter itself against the overhead light—drawn to what would destroy it, she thought, and wasn't that the fundamental story of her marriage?

Inside, David was asleep on the couch, their old dog curled against his shins like it had spent fifteen years doing. The dog, at least, had the dignity of consistency. David would wake up apologetic, promising again that he'd stop, that this time the promotion wouldn't cost them whatever was left between them. But Clara had stopped believing in the arithmetic of sacrifices.

She remembered the fox she'd seen earlier that evening, slipping through the tall grass with that fluid, opportunistic grace. Her mother's voice came to her unbidden: *A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.* What was the one important thing she knew? That she was forty-two years old and tired of being the person who waited.

The cabin's owner had left a collection of curiosities on the mantle—a brass sphinx, its face eroded by someone's polishing cloth, staring eternally at questions it would never answer. That was them, she realized. David and Clara, frozen in the posture of riddle without resolution, both waiting for the other to break.

Her phone buzzed on the railing. The job offer in Seattle, the one David had called "impulsive" and "midlife crisis flavored." She set the wine glass down and watched the water rush past, carrying last week's rain toward some ocean she hadn't seen yet.

The sphinx moth had stopped moving. She stepped inside, packed her bag, and left before the fox could teach her anything else about survival.