The Base Stone

The supplements sat on Mara's desk like tiny tablets of hope. Vitamin D3, the doctor had said. You're deficient. At forty-seven, she was apparently deficient in everything—sunlight, joy, purpose, and now basic nutrients.

Her hair had started thinning six months ago. She found strands everywhere—on her keyboard, in her coffee mug, woven into the carpet of her cubicle like evidence of some slow unraveling. Greg from two desks over had stopped making eye contact. He was thirty-two, with thick, careless hair and the kind of confidence that came from never having been fired yet.

Mara stared at the org chart projected on the conference room screen. The CEO at the apex, then VPs, then directors, then managers, then individual contributors—a perfect pyramid of human beings arranged by diminishing relevance. She was near the bottom, one of the base stones holding up the structure.

"Layoffs," the HR director said, with practiced empathy. "We're streamlining."

Mara thought about the vitamins in her purse. She'd started taking them the week after her divorce, trying to supplement what she'd lost. The lawyer's fees had drained her savings. Her ex-husband was already remarried to someone who didn't need vitamins at all—someone twenty-eight with a body that made its own joy.

She raised her hand. "Will there be severance?"

The HR director's smile didn't reach her eyes. "We'll be discussing that individually."

Later, Mara packed her box. The vitamins went in first, rattling against the cardboard walls. Then the framed photo of her mother, dead three years now. Then the plant she'd kept alive for six years through careful neglect.

In the parking garage, she ran into Greg. He was on his phone, laughing. He saw her box and looked away, then back, with something like pity.

"Sorry, Mara," he said. "That sucks."

"Thanks." She touched her hair self-consciously. A strand came away in her fingers.

"Yeah, my dad went through that too," Greg said, gesturing vaguely at her head. "When he got let go. Stress, I guess. It grew back though."

Mara wanted to slap him. Instead she nodded, got in her car, and sat there for a long time. She took a vitamin from her purse and swallowed it dry.

The pyramid had crumbled, but she was still here. She'd find another pyramid. There was always another structure to support, always someone else's empire to build on her back. She started the car and drove toward the sunset, feeling the vitamin dissolve inside her, a tiny, useless act of faith.