Market Corrections

At 47, Marcus had become a zombie of his own making—sleepwalking through pharmaceutical sales conferences, shaking hands with men who smelled of expensive cologne and desperate optimism. His apartment, sterile and minimalist, contained only three living things: a dying fern, himself, and Barnaby, a morbidly orange cat who regarded him with what Marcus interpreted as judgment.

The bull market had been good to him once. Bonuses pooled in accounts he never checked. But bulls tire, and bears emerge from hibernation hungry. Now his portfolio hemorrhaged value in real-time on the monitor he'd taken to leaving on—watching red numbers accumulate like paper cuts.

"You look like shit," Sarah said, sliding a martini across the bar. His ex-wife still made time for drinks monthly, a ritual as comforting as it was excruciating. "Have you been taking those vitamins I recommended?"

"The giant horse pills?" Marcus swirled his drink. "Yes, Sarah. I'm practically radiating wellness."

She laughed, but her eyes softened with that familiar concern—the way she used to look at him when his mother died, or when he'd lost the promotion to a man half his age who called everyone "chief." "You can't just keep watching it go down, Marcus."

"Bear with me," he said, then regretted the pun immediately.

But she didn't smile. "I met someone."

The words hit him like physical violence. Not because he wanted her back—they'd been honest about their expiration date. But because her moving forward meant he was truly alone in his stasis. Barnaby would demand dinner regardless of market conditions. The vitamins would sit in their bottle, promises of a future he wasn't sure he wanted.

"Congratulations," Marcus said, and meant it.

Later, at home, the orange cat jumped onto his lap. The monitor glowed with futures dipping, falling, persisting. Outside, the city hummed with millions of people sleeping, waking, loving, losing. Marcus pet Barnaby's soft fur and felt something shift inside—some vast, terrified certainty that there was no recovery coming, and that perhaps, in the wreckage of everything he'd built, he might finally become someone real.

He turned off the screen. The vitamin bottle sat on his nightstand, a small orange promise. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he'd take one.