The Pyramid Scheme

Margaret found the cat—emaciated, matted, shivering—in the alley behind her office building. She named him Bastet, after the Egyptian goddess, because that's what you did when you spent thirty years excavating tombs and then got pushed out by the university's new, shiny donors.

"You're being difficult," David had said in his office that morning. David with his fox-like smile, his suits that cost more than her annual salary, his way of making every conversation feel like a negotiation he'd already won. "The department is moving in a new direction. More corporate partnerships. Better funding."

She'd looked at the pyramid on his desk—a paperweight, brass and heavy, absurdly on display for someone who'd never held a trowel. "You mean selling out."

"I mean evolving."

Now she sat on her fire escape with the cat purring in her lap, the city humming beneath them. She was fifty-three years old, her joints ached, and she'd spent three decades piecing together the lives of people who'd been dead for four millennia. For what? So a man like David could arrange grants with beverage companies?

The cat bit her finger—gently, testing. Margaret laughed, surprised by the sound of it. She'd forgotten how to laugh in that office.

Her phone buzzed. David: "Can we discuss your exit package? Don't be stubborn about this, Margaret. Don't bull-rush through the door."

She deleted the message.

The pyramid of her career had seemed so solid from the inside: each level a promotion, each publication a new stone in the monument. But from the outside, she saw what it really was—a structure built on other people's curiosity, other people's money, other people's tolerance for her obsession with the past.

The cat jumped down and stretched, looking back at her like: Well? Are you coming?

Margaret stood up, her knees cracking. The office could keep its papers, its hierarchy, its fox in charge of the henhouse. She had a living creature to feed, an apartment to clean out, and suddenly, the rest of her life to figure out what it was actually for.