The Last Pyramid

Emma sat on her bathroom floor, counting the strands in the sink. Thirty-seven. Another pyramid of hair, this one smaller than last week's, but a pyramid nonetheless. The chemotherapy brochure had mentioned this—called it 'temporary hair loss,' as if anything about dying was temporary.

"You're going to beat this," Sarah had said three hours ago, pressing a bottle of biotin into Emma's hand like it was holy water. "My friend's cousin took these vitamins and—"

"Your friend's cousin had a vitamin deficiency, Sarah. I have stage three lymphoma."

Sarah had flinched. That was the thing about friends who meant well: they wanted pyramids they could climb, steps from diagnosis to remission, clean angles and predictability. Emma's reality was more like falling.

The cat, Barnaby, brushed against her knee. He was Sarah's idea too—emotional support, she'd said, dropping him off two weeks after Emma's first round of chemo. Barnaby didn't know she was sick. He just knew she spent more time on the bathroom floor now, and that her lap was warmer without clothes.

Emma opened the vitamin bottle. The pills were enormous, pink and glossy like candy. She swallowed one without water, felt it scrape down her throat like a stone.

Her phone buzzed. Sarah again: *Coming over with soup. Don't argue.*

Emma typed back: *Bring wine instead.*

She caught her reflection in the mirror—pale face, dark circles, the thinning hair that had always been her best feature, now betraying her like everything else. She thought about the pyramids she'd built in her life: the career ladder she'd abandoned at thirty-two, the marriage that dissolved at thirty-seven, the friendships that had quietly eroded. Now this—a biological pyramid, cells stacking upon themselves in a monument to her own mortality.

Barnaby meowed, demanding dinner.

"Yeah," Emma said to him, "me too."

She stood up slowly, legs aching, and walked to the kitchen. The vitamin bottle sat on the counter like a promise she wasn't sure she wanted to keep. Outside, the November sky was gray and endless, a ceiling pressing down on everything.

But then she thought of Sarah with her soup and her desperate hope, and Barnaby winding through her legs, and the small, stubborn fact that she'd taken the vitamin anyway. Some pyramids you climbed. Some you dismantled, stone by heavy stone. And some, you simply sat inside and waited for the sun to rise.