Pyramids Don't Weep

The corporate pyramid scheme hadn't been Marcel's idea, but he'd built it anyway—layer upon layer of middle management, each tier more expensive and less necessary than the last. Now, staring at the spreadsheet projected on the conference room wall, he watched his career flatten like a cartoon character under an anvil.

"Bullshit," someone whispered from the back. Marcel didn't turn. He knew it was bullshit. He'd been feeding it to them for three years.

His phone buzzed. Sarah again. She'd texted twelve times since yesterday, when they'd put down Buster—that ancient, arthritic golden retriever who'd been the only honest thing in their marriage. Marcel had excused himself from the vet's office with some nonsense about an urgent call, leaving Sarah to hold the dog's head while the needle found its vein.

The CEO, a man whose confidence outstripped his competence by several orders of magnitude, pointed at the declining revenue curve. "We need to pivot."

Marcel's phone lit up again. A photo: Buster's favorite chew toy, abandoned on the back porch.

"I'm sorry," Sarah had said last night, her voice cracking. "But I can't do this anymore. You're never actually here."

He wasn't. He was here, in this glass-walled pyramid of ambition, pretending his stock options mattered more than the slow, quiet collapse of everything real.

"Marcel?" The CEO was looking at him. "Thoughts?"

He stood up. The room went quiet. He thought about pyramids—how they were built on the backs of workers who died young, how they contained nothing but dead kings and curse-infested air. He thought about bulls charging matadors, the beautiful stupidity of their rage. He thought about dogs, who loved without conditions and left behind chew toys and broken hearts.

"I quit," Marcel said.

The silence that followed was thick with surprise. But Marcel was already walking out, phone in hand, typing:

"I'm coming home."