Bear Market of the Heart

The terminal screen glowed crimson at 3 AM, each candlestick another notch in the rope Marcus was slowly fashioning for himself. Three weeks into the bear market and his portfolio had shed forty percent, but it was the other losses that kept him staring at the ceiling until dawn.

His golden retriever, Buster, nudged his hand with a wet nose, sensing the vacuum where Marcus's soul used to be. The dog had been Sarah's idea—her parting gift, though she'd called it a companion when she walked out four months ago with her vitamins and her yoga mat and half the furniture, leaving behind only her houseplants and a bone-deep certainty that Marcus would forget to water both.

Marcus swallowed his daily vitamin without water, the pill scratching his throat. He'd been running on caffeine and denial since the crash began, since the bull market that had sustained his entire identity—he was a genius, a prodigy, the man who could do no wrong—had finally trampled him. The analysts on CNBC were calling it a correction. Marcus called it Thursday.

The doorbell rang.

Impossible. Nobody rang doorbells anymore. They texted or they didn't.

Buster's tail thumped against the floorboards, a metronome marking time in a house that had forgotten how to keep it. Marcus opened the door to find Sarah standing there, holding a plant that was somehow still alive.

"I forgot this fern," she said, by way of hello. "And I wanted to make sure you were eating."

He stepped aside. She walked in as if she'd never left, trailing the scent of rain and someone else's cologne, and Marcus felt something in his chest shift—a bull market turning bear, the slow recognition that value had been artificially inflated all along.

"The market's crashing," he told her, because it was the only language he had left.

"I know," she said, placing the fern on the windowsill where the morning light would catch it. "I saw the news. But Marcus—you can't keep running from yourself. Eventually the music stops, and all that's left is who you were when nobody was watching."

Buster rested his head on Sarah's foot. Marcus swallowed something that wasn't a vitamin.

"Stay for coffee?" he asked, already knowing she wouldn't.

She didn't. But as the door clicked shut behind her, Marcus found himself kneeling on the floor, burying his hands in Buster's golden fur, crying for the first time since the numbers went red. Somewhere in the house, a fern leaned toward the light, and the bear market, he realized, had just found its bottom.