The Pyramid Scheme

Maya's hair had started falling out in clumps three months after the promotion. She found the first strands on her pillow, dark and accusing, like tiny ropes she'd used to hang herself. Now she ran her fingers through what remained — thinner, fragile — and wondered if her body was trying to tell her something her mind refused to hear.

The iPhone buzzed on her hotel nightstand at 2:14 AM. Another email from Richard, forwarded from his iPhone to hers, cc'ing half the corporate pyramid. They wanted the Q3 projections by morning. The pyramid — that's what Richard called the organizational chart during her interview, smiling with too many teeth. 'Room to climb,' he'd said. He hadn't mentioned the bodies you'd step on to ascend.

She'd been climbing for seven years. At thirty-five, she was two levels below Richard, making more money than her parents had seen in their lifetimes, sleeping in hotels like this one three weeks a month. Her last relationship had ended via text message — on his iPhone, not hers. 'You love your job more than you could ever love me,' he'd written, and she hadn't disagreed.

The email attachment contained a photograph of the new team structure. A perfect pyramid. Her name in a box near the top, if she delivered. Richard's box above hers, and the CEO above him, and somewhere unseen, the shareholders who owned them all.

Maya opened the browser on her phone and searched for something she'd read years ago: 'What do Egyptians call mummies?' The answer appeared instantly: 'The living.' They'd believed death was merely a transition, that the pyramid was a machine for resurrection.

What was this pyramid resurrecting in her?

She walked to the bathroom mirror, studied her reflection. The hair loss had created a crescent of visible scalp, pale as bone. Her grandmother had gone bald in her seventies. Maya was thirty-five.

The iPhone buzzed again. Richard. Probably wondering why she wasn't responding.

Maya considered the pyramid of her life: the student loans paid off, the impressive title, the beautiful empty apartment she rarely saw. The top of the pyramid offered a glorious view — assuming you survived the climb.

She typed her resignation in the body of a new email, not an attachment. Two sentences. No apologies. Then she booked a flight home, opened the window, and watched her iPhone arc into the Phoenix night sky, a bright meteorite falling toward the desert floor, trailing messages it would never deliver.