Pyramid Scheme

Maya arranged the papaya slices into a perfect pyramid on her bedside table, each piece glistening like some sacred offering. At forty-two, she'd learned that grief had its own architecture—wide at the base, narrowing toward some point you never actually reached.

"You're doing that thing again," Ethan said from the bathroom, his razor scraping against his skin. "Building monuments to fruit that's just going to rot."

She touched the crescent of orange on her nightstand instead, its skin dimpled like her mother's hands had been. Three months since the funeral, and still she couldn't walk through a grocery store without feeling like she was violating a crime scene. Her mother had loved tropical fruit—said it reminded her of the honeymoon she'd taken alone after leaving Maya's father.

"The corporate pyramid scheme," Maya said, not answering him directly. "That's what the grief counselor called it. You think you're climbing toward resolution, but you're just carrying someone else's weight upward forever."

Ethan appeared in the doorway, towel around his waist. They hadn't had sex in seven weeks—another kind of pyramid, this one built of silence and exhaustion. "Your sister called. She wants Mom's papaya bread recipe. Like there's some secret ingredient that explains why none of us could make her stay."

Maya ate a slice of papaya. It was too ripe, bordering on fermented, sweet and faintly rotten. That was the thing about pyramids—you could see where you were headed from the ground floor. Every step brought you closer to the sharp alone point at the top.

"Tell her the secret's in the orange zest," Maya said, and closed her eyes against the morning light flooding the room, wondering which of them would be the first to walk away, and which would be left standing at the base, looking up at everything they'd built together and seeing only the geometry of their own disappearance.