Pyramid of Empty Things

Marla traced the lifeline on her palm, the skin creased like a topographic map of nowhere important. The palm reader in Tulum had told her she'd live to eighty-seven, but Marla had stopped believing in futures around the same time she stopped believing in pyramid schemes.

"You're thinking about it again," David said, slicing into a papaya with surgical precision. The juice ran yellow-gold onto the mahogany table of their corporate suite. "The Luxor presentation."

"I'm thinking about how we're building pyramids of empty things," Marla said, watching the fruit separate into perfect wedges. "Hierarchies within hierarchies. All of it designed to look like a monument from a distance, but up close? Just blocks of bullshit stacked on top of each other."

David's knife paused. "You used to love this part. The strategy. The climb."

"I used to think the climb was going somewhere." Marla turned her hand over, studied the lines the sun had etched into her skin during three days of mandatory team-building exercises. "Now I realize we're just bulls in a china shop, trampling through everything that matters because we're too blind to see what we're breaking."

The papaya sat between them like an accusation—sweet, foreign, briefly vibrant before it rots.

"I met with Marcus this morning," David said quietly. "He's making me VP."

Marla looked up then. "And?"

"And I told him I'd think about it." David set down the knife. "But really I was thinking about what you said yesterday. About how pyramids are built on graves."n

nThe sun was setting over the resort, palm trees casting long shadows across their expensive isolation. Somewhere below, the ocean continued its ancient rhythm, indifferent to their tiny human concerns about money and meaning.

"Take it," Marla said. "Or don't. But if you take it, know what you're climbing toward."

"And if I don't?"

She took a wedge of papaya, tasted the sweetness that would fade to nothing within hours. "Then we figure out what's worth building instead."