What the Sphinx Whispered

The papaya sat on the counter, its flesh the color of something between sunset and bruise. Elena had bought it three days ago, when she still believed that eating something vibrant could make her feel vibrant again.

Now the apartment was quiet. Marcus had moved his things out yesterday — books, records, that annoying brass sphinx paperweight he'd brought back from Egypt. It had stared at her from his desk for two years, its painted eyes knowing everything she'd tried to hide: that she was lonely, that she wanted children he didn't, that she stayed out of fear of being alone.

He'd called her a goldfish once. "You have no memory for pain," he'd said. "You forget how much I've hurt you and just keep swimming back to the same hand that feeds you."

She'd laughed it off then, but at night she'd catch herself staring at the sphinx, wondering what riddle she was failing to solve.

Outside, a fox screamed. That high, broken sound that meant it was mating season or killing season, always both at once. Elena went to the window. The streetlights made everything look like a photograph taken through tears.

She picked up a knife and cut into the papaya. It was softer than she expected, giving way like something that had been holding itself rigid for too long. The scent filled the kitchen — musk and sweetness, something alive and rotting all at once.

"The sphinx asks: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening," Marcus had told her once, drunk and sentimental in that way that made her love him and hate him in equal measure. "The answer is a person. We crawl, then we walk upright, then we lean on a cane."

She'd wanted to tell him: some of us start leaning much earlier. Some of us crawl forever.

The papaya seeds looked like something embryonic. She ate a piece, letting the juice run down her chin. It tasted like forgiveness, which is to say it tasted like choosing to remember things differently than they happened.

The fox screamed again, closer this time.

Elena put the rest of the papaya in the trash. She would not be the goldfish tonight. She would not forget. She would stand in the empty kitchen and remember everything exactly as it was, and then she would walk into the bedroom she now had entirely to herself, and she would sleep, and in the morning she would begin whatever came next.

The sphinx had no riddles for her anymore. She was the answer now.