Bear Market Blues

The portfolio had bled red for three months. Sarah sat at the kitchen counter, spinach stuck between her teeth from the salad she'd barely touched, watching Marcus pace the living room like a caged animal.

'It's a bear market,' he said, for the fifth time that evening. 'The whole sector's down.' His hands moved as if conducting an orchestra, or perhaps summoning a bull from thin air. 'But we're positioned for the rebound. The bulls always return.'

Sarah swallowed a piece of spinach that tasted like despair. Their savings were evaporating, and Marcus's optimism felt like gaslighting wrapped in financial jargon. She remembered the first time he'd taken her to a baseball game, how he'd explained the statistics, the probabilities, how certain players always came through in the clutch. He made life sound calculable. Controllable.

But there was no algorithm for marriage.

'I'm going swimming,' she said abruptly.

Marcus stopped pacing. 'It's November.'

'The building has a pool.'

She left him there with his Bloomberg terminal and his dreams of bull markets, descending to the basement where the pool sat like a forgotten aquarium. The water was cold, shocking her skin as she slipped beneath the surface. Swimming had always been her meditation—the silence, the weightlessness, the way her body became something efficient rather than broken.

She thought about her father, who'd lost everything in 2008. The way he'd sat at his kitchen table, unshaven, staring at nothing. He'd told her once that the market was just organized gambling, and the house always won eventually. Marcus called her father cynical. She called him experienced.

Sarah floated on her back, staring at the ceiling where fluorescent lights hummed. The bear would eat them, or it wouldn't. The bull would return, or it wouldn't. But this—not knowing whether their life together was built on sand or stone—this was the drowning part.

When she returned to the apartment, Marcus was asleep at his desk. She covered him with a blanket and stood at the window, watching the city lights flicker like distant stars. The spinach was gone from her teeth, but the taste remained. Some things didn't wash away. Some choices, once made, rippled outward like a body breaking the surface of dark water.