The Pyramid of Silent Hours

Mark stood before the bathroom mirror, swallowing his daily **vitamin** with the mechanical precision of a man who'd forgotten how to feel anything at all. Forty-three years old, and he'd become what he'd once sworn never to be: a creature of habit moving through days that blurred together like wet watercolor.

The office tower rose before him, a glass **pyramid** thrusting into the gray Seattle sky. Inside, his colleagues moved with the shuffling deliberation of the undead. He'd started calling them **zombies** three years ago—first as a joke, then as a comfort, then as the simple truth. They were the living dead, and he was their king.

"We need to discuss the Q3 projections," Chen said, her eyes dead as she tapped her pen against her notebook. Mark nodded, his mouth shaping the words that had shaped themselves a thousand times before.

The **bull** market had been raging for six years, and everyone knew what happened when bulls stopped running. Mark's father had died in the last crash—heart attack in his home office, still gripping a fallen stock ticker. Some inheritance.

That afternoon, Mark found himself standing before the building's abstract sculpture—a massive bronze bull, its horns lowered as if ready to charge. He'd walked past it a thousand times. Today, he pressed his forehead against its warm metal flank and closed his eyes.

"You okay?"

He opened his eyes. A woman—new, maybe from accounting—stood nearby with genuine concern in her eyes. The first real thing he'd seen in months.

"Just thinking," Mark said. "About how this bull has been here fifteen years and hasn't moved an inch."

She smiled. "Maybe it's waiting."

"For what?"

"For someone to finally notice it's standing still."

That night, Mark didn't take his vitamin. He stood on his balcony and watched the city lights blur beneath him, and for the first time in three years, he didn't feel like a zombie at all. He felt like a man who might finally be ready to move.

The next morning, he asked the woman from accounting to lunch. She said yes. The pyramid of silent hours had finally developed a crack.