What the Sphinx Knows

Arthur sat in his worn wingback chair, the iPhone in his trembling hands feeling like an artifact from another century. His granddaughter Emma had shown him how to use it three times already, but the screen-swipe gesture remained as mysterious as the riddles of the sphinx he'd studied in college philosophy class.

That course had been taught by Professor Morrison, a man who'd stood at the front of the lecture hall like a bear—hulking, gruff, yet unexpectedly gentle when a student struggled. Arthur had carried Morrison's voice in his head for sixty years: 'The real questions don't have answers, Arthur. They have better questions.'

He'd asked himself plenty of better questions over the decades. Why did lightning strike the same oak tree twice in one summer, the year he met Martha at the church social? Why had he been given four more decades with her than some couples got? What legacy did a man leave when he'd never written a book or built a business?

The iPhone chimed—an incoming call from his great-grandson in Seattle. Arthur's thumb finally found the green button.

'Great-Grandpa!' Leo's voice crackled through the tiny speaker. 'I'm reading about Egypt in school. Do you know what a sphinx is?'

Arthur smiled, the ache in his chest sweet rather than sharp. 'A sphinx is a creature who asks riddles, Leo. The most important one is: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening.'

Silence on the line, then: 'A person! Because babies crawl, grown-ups walk, and old people use canes!'

'Exactly.' Arthur's eyes welled. 'And the sphinx lets you pass when you understand that life itself is the answer.'

He'd never built monuments. But somewhere in Seattle, a boy carried a piece of his wisdom forward. And somewhere, Professor Morrison and Martha were probably smiling, like lightning in a summer sky—sudden, illuminating, impossibly brief.