Goldfish in a Bear Market

The goldfish circled his bowl, endlessly oblivious. Sarah had bought it for Emma's sixth birthday—Emma who was now sixteen, who'd stopped circling anything in this house years ago.

Mark watched the fish while his Bloomberg terminal scrolled crimson. Bear market territory. The numbers bleeding out matched how he felt inside—hollowed out, running on caffeine and speculation and that expensive vitamin regime his doctor insisted couldn't hurt. Could hurt.

His phone vibrated.

"Think about coming home," she'd said yesterday. "Emma asked about you."

Emma didn't ask about him. Emma tolerated him, in that way teenage daughters tolerate fathers who'd been absent more than present. He'd been a bull in the china shop of their life, charging through with that trader's confidence, never stopping to count what he'd broken.

The market kept falling. His portfolio with it.

"Dad?" Emma stood in the doorway. She'd grown beautiful while he wasn't looking. "You haven't fed him."

She meant the fish.

"I will."

"You say that." She hesitated. "Mom said you might sell the apartment."

He might. Everything liquid now.

She left him there with the goldfish and his vitamins and the market collapse on multiple screens. In the kitchen, he swallowed the handful of pills—A, D, E, omega-3, something for joints that still ached from years of sitting, something for sleep that never came.

The fish nipped the surface of its bowl, gasping.

Mark fed it, then found himself weeping, standing in his socks in a kitchen that cost more per month than his first year's trading bonus, watching a goldfish eat flakes while his career dissolved and his marriage stayed stubbornly, permanently broken.

The bear market would end. Eventually. Everything did.

He picked up his phone and called Sarah. "I'll keep the apartment," he said. "For Emma. When she wants to visit."

"Oh, Mark," she said, not unkindly. "I wasn't asking you to stay for her."

"I know," he said, and finally admitted what he'd known for months. "I just didn't know what else to offer."