The Sphinx and Ernest Hemingway

A short story

The sphinx laps at the river in a gully thick with the scent of two young male lions, evicted by a father now wary of the competition. Left alone, they will find another pride, separately or together, kill the elder male and his children, and claim the females for their own. The sphinx ponders this as she flicks her tail like a lioness in heat. She seeks no justification for what she means to do, nor is she motivated by compassion for the young who would be slaughtered. She loves the riddle of their behavior, and that is all.

She bounds out of the gully into brown fields stretched long and low to a blue horizon. She pauses to hear the soft pad of their paws and then sprints on, for they must not see her face. The deep rasp of their breath presses close as they run. The sound of it, rumbling out of their broad chests, excites her; and she must lengthen the distance between them lest they hear her purr, something lions cannot do.

She has journeyed miles to find them; she must lead them back just as far, to wound them close to the den and teach her children to finish the job. She thinks of those pink, cherubic faces buried deep in blood and flesh, and she smiles.

As night approaches with amber skies, the kopje that hides her den is lit with speckled reflections of the setting sun. A cry aches in her breast, but she dares not release it—a cougar’s call, a woman’s scream. She has heard that scream herself, echoed from a woman’s lips, but what the human sounds in terror, she mimics in joy. Tears bead and then stream back along her face and into her hair, a deep well of emotion springing out from her eyes.

She alights atop the first rock cropping and then the second. She pauses, flicks her tail, and then drops gently into the stone valley and waits. She looks once between the stones to her den, hidden in shadow. Like shadow upon shadow, she imagines she sees faces stir in the blackness, and then light reflects like red bursts of flame, the bloody glow of the capillaries at the back of her children’s eyes.

She turns away from her children and leaps back atop the kopje. She settles her belly against its cold surface and faces the approaching lions at last. The shadows of the evening will cloak her for a few seconds more, but soon her would-be lovers will see her smooth, pink, hairless face, the intelligent eyes, and playful smile, and they will know that she is more than they expected and more than they can handle. In the moment before she strikes, she will let them hear her scream.

She breathes deep, and a familiar smell tickles her nose. It is as faint as her own scent must be to the approaching lions, for she has positioned herself downwind. She feels the taut pull of panic. She’s been careless and arrogant, too often the hunter, too rarely the prey. The scent is male and human. He’s downwind, where he can wait unnoticed until the moment comes to strike.

She prepares for a desperate spring to safety. Muscles compress and then propel her forward, but as she moves, human thunder echoes across the plain. The bullet pierces her hide and then expands, punching a large hole through her intestines and spleen. It enters like a pinprick and exits like a volcano. The earth tumbles up to meet her.

Pain blinds her at first, and her senses are slow to find their way through her confused thoughts. She smells the fear of the lions. If it were not for the sound of her own blood pulsing through her veins, she would hear their soft retreat. The human male will approach soon to finish her. He will not be alone. They hunt in packs, these humans. She thinks of her children.

She tries to stand, but the pain in her gut is too great. She drags herself through the grass. A few feet away, a rock overhang hides another cave. In summer, she enjoys its shade, but it’s too exposed to den her children. She turns to face her hunters and then backs inside.

Night has come to the Serengeti, and the last of the evening’s purple light fades away in blackness. Footsteps foretell the coming of men. Light flickers across the grass, and in it, she sees her own trail of blood. The light drifts away, but she knows her hunter is not leaving. He can kill at a distance. Several seconds pass, and she cringes, waiting for the kill. One of the lights falls to the ground. It rolls in the grass to within a foot of the cave, this light, like the fire within her children’s eyes, shines without burning. She wonders if she will hear the thunder before she dies, the way her own prey would hear her scream, but neither death nor thunder comes.

A shadow falls across the mouth of the cave. Then more than a shadow, it is a man, staring in at her. His weapon, still in his hand, rests on the grass. He is broad-faced and white, with a mustache, thick and dark.

He asks, “Are you hurt?”

She wants to laugh and to cry. What kind of question is this? She is dying. It seems foolish to admit her weakness and foolish to deny it. At last, she says only, “I am hurt.”

In Swahili he tells the others to watch for the lion. There’s a woman here, injured. She not only understands him, but she manages to smile. Her Swahili is better than his.

In English, he tells her, “We’ll get you to a doctor.” Then he wipes his face with his hand and asks, “Was it the lion?”

She understands the words, but not the question.

When she does not answer, he changes the question. “Did I shoot you?”

She stares at him, bewildered. She nods.

He bows his head and closes his eyes. If she had the strength, she could kill him now. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what happened. I was shooting at a lioness. There was just the one shot. She must have been right on top of you.”

It takes a moment, but at last she understands. He thought he was shooting a lioness, because he could only see her flanks. Now, he can only see her face, and he thinks she is human. Again, she manages to smile, but she is careful to hide her teeth.

“Give me your hand,” he says. “We need to get you out of there.”

“No, I will stay here.”

“It’s perfectly safe. I promise.”

“I will stay here.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“I am dying,” she says, “and I will die here.”

He looks angry now. “Don’t say that.”

She looks at the walls of her cave, pleased with herself. Perhaps, there is a chance to save her children, if the hunter never knows what she is. “This,” she says, “will be my grave.”

“I can’t allow that.”

“You have killed me. Will you deny me this, as well?”

He has no answer for this. She can see the confusion and frustration in his eyes, and she wonders if she could find the strength for one last lunge. She could kill him or wound him enough for her children to finish, but he’s not alone. The pack would kill her, and once they saw what she was, they would hunt down and kill her children.

He asks, “What would you have me do?”

“Leave me to die,” she says. “Cover the entrance with rocks and dirt. Bury me here and go.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Will you bury me when I die? Bury me here, where I am?” She sees his hesitation. She thinks quickly, paws at the riddle of human nature, and finds her answer. “I came here to die. Illness has consumed my flesh, left me in pain and grotesque to other humans.” She catches herself. “Other people. I came here to die, unseen and forgotten. You must not pull me out. I beg you. When I die, bury me where I am.”

Her words connect, and he nods. “I wish I had known you before,” he says. “I would like to have known this woman who came to Africa to die.”

He asks, “What is your name?”

Name. She has no name and cannot invent one now. “I want to die unseen and unknown,” she says. “What is yours?”

“Ernest Hemingway,” he says, and he says it with the expectation that it will mean something. It does.

“I have read you,” she says, and it is true. Sometimes, in the midst of destroying a human camp, she finds books. Hemingway seems to be a favorite among white men in Africa. She has read his short stories and novels and a biography of sorts, A Field Guide to Ernest Hemingway. She remembers it for its riddles:

Hemingway is to Hadley as Herod is to Mariamne.

“Call me Mariamne.” She laughs gently at her joke, and fresh waves of pain rip through her gut.

“Mariamne,” he repeats, without catching the allusion. “What a beautiful name.”

“She was the first wife of King Herod the Great,” she explains. “He had her murdered and then mourned her the rest of his life. Will you mourn me when I’m gone?”

“I will mourn you.”

“For all your life?”

“For all my life.”

She closes her eyes and tries to imagine its true. She knows his relationships with women are murder—the butchering of their memories in conversation, in letters, and in fiction. The one exception is his first wife, Hadley. He divorced her for a wealthier woman but has regretted losing her ever since. Hemingway is to Hadley as Herod is to Mariamne.

“You will never forget me,” she says. “That much I believe.”

“How could I?”

“I don’t believe you could.”

He turns and gives more orders, but in English this time. He has spent his Swahili. Soon he reaches into the cave with a canteen of water. The walls of the cave make it awkward for him to maneuver the canteen. She drinks the water from his hand.

“You’re dehydrated,” he says. “Your tongue is like sandpaper.”

She wonders if he noticed, too, that she pulls back with her tongue, like a cat. He says nothing of it. She likes the taste of salt on his palm.

Another white man kneels at the cave’s opening. His leathered flesh and hard features, and the massive rifle in his grip, mark him as the pack’s Alpha Male. “Let the men pull her out,” he says. “We have to get back to camp.”

#

One of Mariamne’s children ventures out of the den. She is a little beige cub with large, puffy, pink cheeks and starburst hazel eyes. The muffled sound of her mother’s voice draws her, and she scampers across the earthen floor of the rock valley and leaps for one of the walls.

The eldest of the children darts after her, catches the back of her neck in her teeth, and hurls her to the ground. She’s double the size of the runt and used to unquestioned dominance. She has never experienced the mad desperation that pumps through her sister’s veins, the certainty that their mother is hurt.

The runt’s eyes see only the danger that hunts her mother. She hits the ground on all four feet and springs upward, slashing at the throat. The eldest is hardly aware she has been hit before her throat is gone. In embarrassment and spite, she smashes the runt’s skull against the stone wall, and they both tumble to the ground. The sounds of their dying differ, one from the other, as their wounds differ. The eldest sucks in a final reflexive breath, full of blood. The runt’s eyes roll back as seizures ripple through her body. Finally, they lie still, their bodies only inches apart.

#

The hunters argue at the mouth of the cave, but at last the Alpha Male capitulates. Mariamne will not be moved. Her blood-choked cough ends the argument. They look into her eyes, and she knows what they see. Death.

The Alpha Male retreats into the darkness. Hemingway wants to hold her hand, but she will not reach out to him. He strokes her cheek instead and tells her of his home in the Keys. He will take her there, and they will fish off the coast of Cuba. They will go to Paris, to the Little Bar. They will see the world and take in all it has to offer and will come again to Africa, where they will hunt side by side.

“What about your wife?” Mariamne asks, her voice so weak, she doubts he can hear.

“You will be my wife.”

His hand is still on her cheek, and it is the last good thing she feels. She tries to imagine a life with this man, to imagine being human. She wants it, and perhaps she wants it enough to send him away, to tell him to bury her now, to tell him that she will be all right but bury her now. She will be his again, tomorrow. Perhaps. She smiles at this, the final irony of her life, that she is Schrödinger’s cat, Stockton’s Lady or the Tiger. But she will not tell him to go. He will be there when she dies. He will not come back for her.

“If I should find you again, after I die, will we still do these things?” she asks.

Her eyes are closed now, so she cannot see the look on his face as he hesitates with his answer. At last, he says, “Again and again and again.”

She is silent, and he is silent. Her awareness of him comes and goes, and when it comes, she wants to crawl out to him. She lacks now the cunning to stay hidden. She also lacks the strength to emerge. Only once does she reveal herself to him, when she asks, “What should I be for you? A woman or a lion? How would you love me best?”

She cannot hear if he answers her. He still cups her cheek in his palm, and she wants to taste the salt of his sweat. She wants to flick her tail and rub the scent of her hindquarters against him, to stir the animal in him and have him as her mate. In the final throes of delirium, the wall between want and have are shattered, and she believes they’re together, frolicking in the dry savanna grass. With one last burst of strength, she screams.

He hears a scream of terror, but it is not terror she feels. Her last act before dying is this scream of joy.

#

Mary regrets her decision to stay behind. The hunt went long. The sun set, and when the men returned, their arrival failed to lighten the gloom. Instead, they seem to draw it in around them, like a mourner’s veil. They have no right. The veil is hers.

She sits for dinner beside Hemingway. Through each of the courses, he broods, and she can feel that something has happened that no one will talk about. She is tempted to believe that he, like his fictional Macomber, has proven himself a coward, but she knows it is not so simple.

Earlier, he had been hungry for a kill, but the Serengeti refused him. The photographer from Look demanded the worst of him and photographed him claiming another man’s kill, a leopard. He saved what dignity he could, insisting it not be published until he had killed a leopard of his own.

Then, while she had been away, Christmas shopping in Narobi, he had shaved his head, dressed in native garb, and hunted down his reluctant leopard with a spear; a spear and six shotgun blasts. He celebrated the victory without her. He continues now to see one of the women from that night. If she is supposed to ignore or condone it, she can do neither.

They eat in silence, and no photographs are taken. He will not write about this night for the magazine. It, like so many nights, doesn’t fit the romance of his image, the romance of the hunter and the kill. She looks for something to say, but tonight, between the two of them, there is nothing to be said.

She wants to be wanted the way he wanted the leopard. She wants to be chased and overcome and to be the victory celebration that lasts all night and breaks the cot. Yes, she knows her cot has been replaced, and she knows what broke it. She wants him to herself in a way she has never known. Before her there was Martha, Pauline, and Hadley, and others besides. There have been others since. Perhaps, there will be others after, when she is another Martha, Pauline, or Hadley.

When she found Hemingway, she thought she was saving him from Martha, a woman who had grown to despise him. She wonders if, instead, she saved Martha from Hemingway, and there are good reasons he should be despised.

She sleeps on her new cot and tries not to dream about what broke the old one. It brings to her lips a taste for the kill. She has told Hemingway she wants to shoot a lion of her own. It is, she supposes, a half-truth. In her dreams she is Margot, and he is Macomber.

#

Dawn stretches across the savanna and dips its finger into the rock valley where lay the bodies of Mariamne’s cubs. They lay at the bottom of this cup of shadow slowly sipped by the morning’s light, and there their bodies writhe. Flesh boils and squirms, and their chests expand with great gasps of air.

One emerges from death as a human child, and, possessing the fearful memory of her mother’s need, she scrambles back to the rock wall but now lacks the strength and claws to scale it. The other emerges as a lion cub, and, possessing an instinct and a nature that overcomes and undermines her old memories and self, she pounces on the child. Then, proud and ready to feed, she drags the carcass toward the den.

Deep, throaty growls warn her off. The den is full of now-strangers, and the lion cub drops her prize and clambers out of the rock valley. The sphinx cubs drag the carcass back inside and begin to feed.

#

In Mariamne’s grave, her body, too, begins to writhe. Flesh boils and squirms, and her chest expands with great gasps of air. She is Schrödinger’s cat. She is both lion and woman and the uncertainty between two states, until Hemingway comes to unearth her grave. He has not slept and comes now, alone or thinking he is alone, to uncover her grave. He must see her one last time. She is Stockton’s Lady or The Tiger, waiting for him with either love or death, and maybe neither choice is so different than the other, for Mary follows after him with the Alpha Male’s gun.

With the last of the rock and soil dug free, Hemingway steps back, pushed away by the stench, a stench as strong as death, but it is not death he smells. He drops to one knee, several yards from the mouth of the cave, and peers inside.

Mary appears to his right, the great mass of the rifle weighing down her arms as she aims. He is still looking at her when Mariamne charges out of the cave and thunder explodes across the grasslands. The body drops to the ground and slides three feet across the dew.

Hemingway jumps to his feet, looks at the body, and looks at Mary. Mary smiles; it is a smile that says her shot was more than perfect. It has castrated without touching, without wounding, by simply killing that which he most desired. She wanted a kill of her own, and she has found it. She will not ignore. She will not condone.

Hemingway stays after Mary has left. The cave is empty. Mariamne’s perfect body lies sprawled in the grass. The morning sun rises higher in the east and will soon choke the savanna with its heat.

—Thaddeus Thomas

About the Story

In December of 2003, I became active in a forum, an adjunct of a site with other things on its minds, and happily critiqued stories and offered my own for the same. It’s possible that I wrote the first draft of the story during this time, certainly not before.

Over New Years, they shut the forum down, and finding myself without my newfound community, I founded Better Fiction, a critique forum that played a strong role in the indie community for a few years, struggled on a few more, and closed at the end of the decade.

The Better Fiction community helped me polish this and all my stories published during that time. This one was a favorite and found a home in the second edition of Fantasy Magazine (during that short span when it was a physical publication) and was an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

If you were a reader of the first iteration of ThaddeusThomas.com, I reprinted it twice there. The first time, I’d been on Substack for 5 days, which means this is the anniversary of that posting.

When I immigrated my comment here, it got left behind.

Now, rescued, I present it once again.

Flash Fiction

Not long ago, I started a new effort of offering a weekly work of flash fiction for paid subscribers. (Mostly paid. Some are free.) Now, I want to amp up that challenge with a new piece of flash fiction with every post.

Underbed