The Southern Sphinx

When I became a recluse, I chose the house across from the Mythozoological Conservatory because it was the only one available that didn’t mind a little smoke and occasional screaming. I was, and still am, an herbalist, though I haven’t sold a tincture in years. Most of my clients died or ran off with one of the antlered things that crawl the garden fence on Wednesdays.

I never visited the Conservatory, but it visited me. The first time was with a feather �" dropped into my soup, which was made of moss, black garlic, and something I’d forgotten I was boiling.

The feather sang. I recognized the language at once: Southern Sphinx, an unpleasant tongue made entirely of verbs and accusations. I went to fetch my dictionary, but it had grown damp and was occupied by wasps. I swatted at them with a sandal and read the message anyway.

“I await your answer. Bake it.”

It didn’t say what the question was.

I baked a pie out of silence and pear skins, and left it on the windowsill. By morning it was gone, and the ivy had crept indoors to pet the flour tin. It is considered polite among Conservatory inhabitants to rearrange your kitchen in exchange for food. I awoke to find the salt alphabetized and the knives spelling out obscenities.

The next riddle came three days later, blown in through the chimney wrapped in soot and pheasant bones:

“What has seven legs in the morning?”

I answered: A ladder

I wrote it in caramel on phyllo and fed it to the fire. The flames turned lavender. My spoons began reciting poetry.

Soon, my kitchen began to blur. The walls exhaled bark; the tile softened into moss. I found mushrooms in the kettle and a small nest in the flour tin, still warm. When I opened the pantry, a breeze from some forgotten season tousled my hair.

The riddles continued.

“What remembers nothing but speaks of everything?”

(Silence.)

“I am the world within, a universe small,
Yet vast beyond measure, containing all.
What am I?’’

(Mind)

I no longer slept. My bed had grown antlers and wandered off one night. I wrote letters to it, but the post refuses to deliver to furniture.

Eventually, the Sphinx came in person. She arrived disguised as a woman selling devotional candles. I let her in because she had the eyes of someone who had seen and known darkness.

She sat at my table and folded herself like laundry.

“You have answered adequately,” she said. “But inadequacy has always been my preference.”

I poured her a cup of broth, and she wept politely into it.

“I require one final dish,” she said. “Something old, something sweet, and something you were never meant to remember.”

I told her I had just such a thing in the pantry.

She followed me.

I gave her the custard I made from the memory of my name. I hadn’t used it in years �" too many syllables, and the vowels kept changing.

She ate slowly. Her mane gleamed. Her teeth were like gravestones at dusk.

When she finished, she bowed her head and said:

“You will forget this kitchen by dawn. When you wake, you will be in a forest. You will think you planted it.”

I didn’t argue.