Spinach in the Teeth of God

The bull shark of anxiety had been circling Maya's stomach since Monday. Wednesday found her in the thirty-second floor conference room, watching—helpless—as Derrick from Management smiled with a remarkable specimen of spinach wedged between his front teeth. The corporate pyramid rose invisible and terrible around them, and she thought: this is it. This is what my MBA purchased. Front-row seats to the slow-motion humiliation of men who can't use mirrors.

Derrick pointed at the projection screen with the confidence of a man who'd never been told no. "This quarter's numbers don't lie, folks. We're seeing unprecedented synergy."

Maya's eyes found the coaxial cable snaking along the baseboard, frayed at one end, and suddenly she was thirty years old and watching her mother pack dishes into boxes while her father sat on the couch, the television flickering with some show she couldn't remember anymore, only the blue light against his face like judgment. Some things you don't forgive. Some things you just observe, like artifacts in a museum of someone else's pain.

"Maya?" Derrick's voice cut through. "Thoughts on the rollout?"

She looked at him—really looked at him—with his spinach and his pyramid schemes disguised as organizational restructuring and his terrible, desperate need to be loved by people who would never remember his name. He was like the sphinx she'd seen in Egypt once, posed an impossible riddle without realizing he was the one who didn't know the answer.

"I think," she said, standing up, "that you have something in your teeth."

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was sacred. Derrick's face crumpled like wet paper. The VP of Operations actually gasped. And Maya, finally, felt something shift inside her—something huge and ancient and patient as stone—begin to smile.