Corporate Ascent

The corporate **pyramid** had never looked more merciless from the forty-second floor. Elena pressed her forehead against the glass, watching **lightning** fork across the charcoal sky, each strike illuminating the grid of offices where colleagues had been culled like wheat. Three rounds of layoffs in six months. She was still standing, but for how long?

Her phone buzzed. David. Again.

"Coming to the game?" he'd asked that morning, his voice bright with the naive optimism of someone who hadn't spent the last week watching his professional life disintegrate. The **baseball** tickets had been a birthday gift—front row, expensive, a testament to a time when they believed in forever.

"Not tonight," she'd replied, the words tasting like the **spinach** she'd forced herself to eat at lunch, trying to be healthy for a future that might not include shared mornings.

Now storm cells were hammering the city, and David was probably sitting alone in the rain, those premium tickets soaking through his jacket. Or maybe he'd found someone else to take. The thought was a knife twisting in her gut.

She turned from the window, her desk lamp casting everything in an **orange** glow that made the office feel like the set of some apocalyptic film. Her resignation letter was open on her screen—three sentences, twelve years reduced to a digital file.

The email notification chimed. Another reorg memo.

Elena closed her eyes. She could keep climbing this pyramid, stepping over the fallen bodies of colleagues who'd become friends. She could go home, apologize to David, pretend the storm outside mirrored nothing real.

Or she could walk away.

She hit send. The resignation vanished into the corporate void. Then she dialed David.

"I'm coming," she said when he answered. "Bring an umbrella."

The lightning flashed again, but for the first time in months, she didn't flinch.