Corporate Hieroglyphics

Elena stared at the coaxial cable snaking across her apartment floor like a dead animal's entrails. Three years at Vertex Media and she'd become something else—not quite human, not quite machine. A corporate zombie, shuffling between meetings, consuming lukewarm coffee and meaningless spreadsheets.

The water stain on her ceiling had bloomed overnight. Brown, organic, it spread like a bruise across the white plaster, dripping with mathematical precision onto her carpet. Her landlord's voicemail had been characteristically brief: "We'll get to it."

She should have been sleeping. Instead, she sat cross-legged on the floor, watching the stain grow, thinking about the organizational chart she'd seen earlier that day. The corporate pyramid—executives at the apex, directors beneath them, managers supporting the structure, and at the bottom: thousands of worker ants like her, crushed by the weight of everyone above.

"My mom bought into a pyramid scheme in the 90s," David had told her three weeks ago, when they'd still been something resembling involved. "Sold essential oils and anxiety."

She'd laughed then, wrapped in his sheets, believing connection was possible. Now his side of the bed was cold, his toothbrush gone from the holder, his absence louder than any conversation they'd ever had.

The cable repairman was scheduled for 8 AM. Eight hours of staring at a screen she couldn't quite focus on, pretending to care about Q3 projections, waiting for someone to fix what had broken. Maybe everything was broken. Maybe the water damage was just the universe's way of telling her to notice something other than her own numbness.

She placed a bowl beneath the drip. *Plip. Plip. Plip.*

Somewhere in this city, David was probably sleeping beside someone else. Or maybe he was alone too, staring at his own ceiling, his own cracks, wondering why nothing ever seemed to get fixed—why they all kept pretending their lives weren't slowly flooding while they rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic.

The stain was shaped roughly like a teardrop. Or maybe that was just projection.

Elena lay back on the carpet and watched the darkness. The cable repairman would come. The water would stop. She would go to work. And somewhere above her, invisible and relentless, the corporate pyramid would keep demanding its sacrifices, one zombie at a time.