Market Crash

The trading floor was blood-orange that morning, the color of Maria's lipstick when she kissed David goodbye—except now it smeared across three computer screens in jagged lines of plummeting stocks. David hadn't come home. Again.

"The bull market's dead," Marcus said, not looking up from his terminal. "We're all zombies now."

Sarah—forty-two, divorced twice, legendary commodities trader—laughed bitterly. She'd been drowning her sorrows in lukewarm water cooler conversations for three months since her younger sister's suicide. The office aquarium, its lone angelfish circling endlessly, was the only thing keeping her tethered to sanity.

"Zombies don't feel pain, Marcus. That's their advantage." She touched the orange candle stub she kept on her desk—Elena's favorite scent, now just wax and memory. "They just keep consuming."

Her phone buzzed. David. Finally. She'd begged him to leave that startup, to stop pretending thirty-hour weeks were sustainable. He'd called her crazy, paranoid, a relic of older, softer times. Now he was probably somewhere on this floor, trading on margin, leveraging nothing into less than nothing.

Outside, rain streaked the windows like tears. She'd always loved water—the ocean, rivers, even baths. Elena had too. They'd promised each other a trip to Santorini, orange roofs against blue Aegean. That was six months ago.

Marcus was right about the zombies. She felt like one, hollowed out by grief and this endless parade of men who thought ambition was a personality trait. The David-shaped space in her life wasn't empty anymore; it was filled with everything she couldn't say.

"Marcus," she said quietly. "What happens when there's nothing left to consume?"

He finally looked at her. "We eat each other."

The angelfish floated to the surface of its tank, motionless. Sarah picked up her phone and deleted David's message without reading it. Then she packed her box—the photo of Elena, the orange candle, the seashell from their last childhood beach trip.

Outside, the rain had stopped. The sky was that bruising orange of terminal sunsets, beautiful and terrible. She walked toward the river, not knowing where she was going, just knowing she couldn't stay.