What the Sphinx Whispered

The hotel pool was empty at midnight, the water still as glass. Elena sat at the edge, her legs submerged, thinking about the sphinx riddle her marriage had become: what creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? She'd married a bull of a man—stubborn, charging forward, never pausing to consider what he might destroy. Now, at thirty-two, she was the one who'd been trampled.

She didn't hear him approach. Just suddenly: a man standing at the pool's edge, silver hair catching the moonlight. His hair was longer than most men wore it, pulled back in a loose tie, strands escaping like he'd been running fingers through it for hours.

"Mind if I join you?"

"Free country," she said, though she minded intensely. She wanted to be alone with her misery.

He sat anyway. "Conference?"

"Worst kind. Sales." She gestured toward the sphinx fountain at the pool's center, its stone face eroded by decades of chlorine and weather. "Company mascot, basically. Riddles and secrets and nobody ever gets the answer right."

He laughed, and something in his voice made her look at him really look at him. "My wife left me because I couldn't solve the riddle either."

"Which one?"

"The one about what happens when you stop asking questions."

Lightning flickered across the sky, a silent flash that illuminated the sharp lines of his face. Rain began to fall, gentle at first, then harder. Neither of them moved.

"You're still asking questions," she said.

"Are I?" He looked at her then, really looked, and she felt something shift in her chest like tectonic plates. "Or am I just finally understanding the answer?"

The rain plastered her silk blouse to her skin. His hair was dripping now. The sphinx seemed to be watching them both, stone eyes mocking.

"What's the answer?" she asked, though she wasn't sure which question she meant.

He reached out, fingers hovering just above her wet shoulder. "That sometimes the riddle itself is the problem. Sometimes you need to stop trying to solve it and just... walk away into the desert."

She thought of her bull of a husband, thought of the life she'd been trying to make work for three years, thought of the sphinx and its impossible riddles. She stood up, water cascading from her legs, and held out her hand.

"Show me the desert," she said.