The Corporate Dead

By 9:47 AM, Elena had already become a zombie. Not the brain-eating kind from movies—the corporate variety, shuffling through the fluorescent-lit corridors of her office building, eyes glazed, soul drained somewhere between the third floor lobby and the twelfth floor elevator. She was running on two hours of sleep and desperation, her presentation to the VPs scheduled for noon.

The company's organizational chart had always resembled a pyramid, though lately it felt less like ancient Egyptian engineering and more like a tomb. At the base: hundreds of Elenas, supporting the weight above. At the apex: Marcus Chen, CEO and architect of their collective exhaustion. Elena had spent the last three months digging herself out from under a project avalanche, climbing toward a promotion that had been dangled like fresh meat before starving dogs.

Her phone buzzed. David.

'You coming to lunch?'

Elena stared at the message. David from accounting, with his kind eyes and the way he asked about her weekend like he actually cared. They'd been dancing around something for months—late nights at the office, shared elevator rides, the accidental brush of hands. But Elena had been too busy climbing.

'Can't,' she typed. 'Big presentation.'

The cafeteria was serving spinach salad again. Elena had eaten it every day this week, telling herself she needed the iron, telling herself lots of things. She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror during her lunch break, spinach stuck between her teeth, dark circles under her eyes, and something inside her finally cracked.

She wasn't climbing anymore. She was decaying.

Elena walked past the conference room where the VPs gathered. She kept walking, all the way down to the street, where she called David.

'I'm done being a zombie,' she said when he answered. 'I want to be alive.'

Behind her, the corporate pyramid loomed—a monument to ambition, to sacrifice, to the things people traded for pieces of themselves. Elena turned away and started running, not away from something but toward whatever came next, spinach and deadlines and corporate ladders be damned.