The Last Pyramid

Elena stood in her kitchen at 2 AM, staring at a wilting bag of spinach like it held the answers to her unraveling life. Forty-two years old, and she'd just been promoted to Regional Vice President at a company that sold essential oils to people who couldn't afford rent. The organizational chart was a pyramid scheme in everything but name, and now she was near the top, choking on the rarefied air.

Her cat, Pythagoras — named during a brief, idealistic phase when she'd planned to be a mathematician — wound around her ankles, screaming for food. He was the only living thing who didn't want something from her. No upward mobility. No team-building exercises. Just tuna and occasional affection.

"You know what the problem is, Py?" she said, dumping spinach into a pan with too much olive oil. "I thought getting promoted meant I'd have power. Instead, I just have better health insurance and more guilt."

The spinach sulked in the pan, turning from vibrant green to something defeated and dark. Like her soul, she thought, then immediately hated herself for being so cliché.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. A message from Marcus, the colleague she'd been sleeping with for three months. *Can we talk?*

Elena deleted it. Marcus wanted what they all wanted: to climb higher. He'd already made it clear that her promotion should have been his. Their affair had been transactional, though neither would admit it — two lonely people in a pyramid-shaped building, using each other to feel less alone while sharpening knives for each other's backs.

Pythagoras jumped onto the counter, knocking her phone into the spinach.

"Well," she said, watching the device sink into the greens. "That's one problem solved."

She scraped the spinach and phone into the trash. The pyramid would collapse eventually. They always did. She'd find another job. Maybe she'd take that computational linguistics course she'd been meaning to sign up for since before Pythagoras was a kitten.

"Come on," she told the cat, lifting him to her shoulder. "Let's go sleep on something that isn't a lie."

Somewhere in the building above them, a senior vice president was probably awake too, staring at their own wilted spinach, wondering how they'd ended up at the top of a pyramid that felt more like a prison.