Animal Spirits

The water was always too cold, but Elena kept swimming anyway. Lap after lap, cutting through the silence of the 6 AM pool, the only place where Richard's voice couldn't reach her. Her arms burned, her breath came in ragged gasps, but still she swam—because stopping meant facing the hollow space where their marriage used to be.

Richard was already gone when she returned home, the coffee pot still warm. His text waited on her phone: "Market's looking bullish today. Might be late."

At work, the same metaphor followed her. "We're running with the bulls this quarter," her manager announced, pointing to projections Elena knew were fabricated. She sat in meetings, nodding, while her colleagues bull-shitted about growth strategies they'd never implement. The word made her think of Richard's latest fixation—his new boss, a man whose bullish demeanor masked something predatory.

She found herself driving to the edge of town after work, to that place she'd discovered by accident. The small roadside zoo where the bear paced its enclosure, its fur matted, its eyes fixed on something beyond the chain-link. Elena stood there for twenty minutes, watching it walk the same path, back and forth, back and forth, until the keeper approached.

"He's not sick," the woman said, mistaking Elena's expression. "Just restless. Winter's coming. He can feel it in his bones."

That night, Richard returned smelling of whiskey and expensive perfume. "Bear market coming," he slurred, collapsing onto the sofa. "Better prepare."

Elena stood over him, suddenly seeing it clearly—the bull who'd been charging through their life, trampling everything soft, and the bear who hibernated through every conversation, emerging only to feed. They were all just animals, running on instinct, pretending at civilization.

She packed that night while he slept. Left her phone, her credit cards, took only the cash she'd been saving for months. At dawn, she drove north, toward a place she'd read about—where people stripped away everything unnecessary, learned to live with less. She didn't know if she was running toward something or away. She only knew that for the first time in years, she could finally breathe.