The Corporate Pyramid

The coaxial cable hung from the ceiling like a dead snake, its severed end dripping copper wire onto the conference room table. Elena stared at it, remembering how David had taped it up three years ago with that infuriating confidence of his.

They'd been a pyramid scheme of two back then—she, the cynical operations manager, and David, the smooth-talking salesman who could sell ice to polar bears. Their friendship had been built on late-night baseball games at the dive bar around the corner, cheap beers, and shared resentment of the corporate ladder they were both simultaneously climbing and sabotaging.

"He's not coming back," Marcus said from the head of the table. The new VP, thirty-two and already running on pure ambition and cortisol. "David's position is being eliminated."

Elena thought about David's apartment—the empty boxes, the baseball trophies collected like evidence of a childhood he'd sold for equity she'd never see vest. The pyramid had finally collapsed. The only thing left was this cable, this fucking cable that David had promised to fix before he skipped town with his golden parachute.

"I'll handle it," she heard herself say. Because that's what she always did. Clean up the messes. Keep the signal running. Maintain the connections.

Later that night, she found herself at their bar, watching the baseball game without sound. The pyramid of empty beer cans grew on the table as David's text message glowed on her phone: *"I did what I had to do."*

Elena ordered another drink, thinking about corporate structures and Egyptian tombs and how some friendships were just monuments to people you used to know. She wrapped the coaxial cable from work around her finger like a ring, pulling until the metal bit into her skin, wondering if she should feel angry or grateful that she was still here, still tethered, still running the same race she'd never signed up for.

The bartender placed another drink in front of her. "Rough night?"

"Just missing a friend," she said, and surprised herself by meaning it.