Pyramids of the Walking Dead

The corporate pyramid stretched above me like a glass tombstone, each floor a rung on a ladder I'd stopped climbing years ago. I shuffled past cubicle after cubicle, another zombie in the hive, my soul eroded by fluorescent lights and quarterly projections.

'Gary, the Peterson account needs review by EOD.'

I nodded, something between a grunt and a sigh escaping my throat. The words barely registered. Everything blended together now—emails that demanded urgency for projects that didn't matter, meetings about meetings, the endless grind of being undead in a suit.

My phone buzzed. Sarah.

'You coming to the game tonight? Bobby's pitching.'

Baseball. The word hit me like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. Bobby, my nephew, twelve years old and still believed in something. Still believed the world could be fair, that effort equaled reward, that dreams were worth having.

I remembered taking him to his first professional game last summer. The crack of the bat, the smell of hot dogs and stale beer, Bobby's eyes wide as the ball arced toward the bleachers. For three hours, I'd felt something resembling joy. For three hours, I wasn't a zombie.

'Yeah,' I typed back. 'I'll be there.'

My phone vibrated again. A photo: Buster, our aging golden retriever, muzzle now gray, lying on Bobby's feet as the boy practiced his pitching form in the backyard. The dog looked up at the camera with eyes that held more wisdom than any CEO I'd ever met. Buster, who'd loved us through bankruptcies and divorces, through promotions and funerals, whose tail thumped against the floorboards like a metronome marking time in a world that had forgotten how to keep it.

I sat at my desk, surrounded by zombies in suits, in a pyramid built on nothing, and I thought about that dog. About baseball games and boys who still believed. About how we'd all started as something real and let ourselves be hollowed out, piece by piece, until we were just walking corpses in air-conditioned tombs.

'Peterson account,' I whispered to myself. 'Right.'

But my fingers hovered over the keyboard, and for the first time in years, I wondered what it would take to feel alive again.