The Pyramid Scheme

Maya sat on the hotel balcony, Giza's **pyramid** looming against a sunset the color of bruised fruit. Her **iPhone** buzzed again—David, asking if she was coming back to the room. She'd told him she needed air, but the truth was, she needed to not be near him for five minutes.

The corporate retreat had been his idea. Team building, he'd called it. She called it another **cable** around her neck—another expectation to perform, to be the supportive partner while climbing the corporate ladder together. The metaphor wasn't lost on her: they were both just worker ants building someone else's monument.

Room service arrived. The only thing she'd ordered that felt real was the fresh **papaya**, bright orange and impossibly sweet against the stale air conditioning and the PowerPoint presentations about synergy and leveraging assets.

She caught her reflection in the glass door. Hollow eyes, skin pale from too many fluorescent-lit days. A **zombie**, really. Not the pop culture kind—the scarier, real kind. The kind that shows up every day, goes through the motions, builds someone else's dreams while their own rot on the vine.

'You're not happy,' David had said that morning, like it was a performance review she'd failed.

'I'm fine,' she'd replied, automatic as a screensaver.

The papaya tasted like something she hadn't felt in years—hope, maybe. Or just the memory of what it was like to want something. She thought about her sister's email last week, the one she'd archived without answering: 'I'm starting that farm in Costa Rica. Come visit. Stay as long as you want.'

Her iPhone buzzed again. David. Then her boss. Then the group chat about tonight's networking dinner.

Maya finished the papaya, wiped her sticky fingers on the hotel robe, and did something she hadn't done in seven years of climbing the corporate pyramid. She didn't reply. She turned off her phone, left it on the balcony table like a dead thing, and went back into the room to pack.