Market Memory

Mara ran because it was the only time her mind went quiet. Three miles into her route through Battery Park, the bull statue near Wall Street loomed—its charging form cast long shadows across her path. The market had been running like a bull for three years, and so had she: running from the memories, running from the empty nursery she'd finally converted into a home office last spring.

That morning, she'd watched the last of her embryos thaw during the IVF procedure. The doctor had called them "slow-growing"—the clinical term for embryos that never divided properly, never became. She'd thought of the goldfish bowl in her therapist's waiting room, how the orange fish swam in endless circles, forgetting where it'd been every three seconds. Maybe forgetting was a gift.

Her phone buzzed. Mark. Again. He'd been calling since she left the clinic.

"I made dinner," his voicemail began when she finally listened, leaning against her car in the clinic parking garage. "Your favorite. That spinach salad with the warm bacon dressing. From that place in the Village."

She hadn't had the heart to tell him months ago that she hated spinach, that she'd only eaten it those first years of dating because he said it was sexy, how she'd lick the green flecks from her teeth afterwards. That was before the trying, before the months of temperatures and supplements and calculated fucks, before she'd learned that her body was a hostile environment, inhospitable terrain.

The market analysts on CNBC were still talking about the bull run when she let herself into their apartment that evening. Mark was asleep on the couch, a half-eaten container of spinach going warm on the coffee table beside him. He looked so innocent like this, mouth slightly open, the weight of all their disappointments temporarily lifted in sleep.

Mara stood over him, feeling something like love and something like exhaustion warring in her chest. She thought about the goldfish in Dr. Chen's office, how it swam its tiny circles and never seemed to mind that it was going nowhere, that it would forget its journey almost as soon as it began. Maybe that was the trick—to keep swimming, even if you couldn't remember why you'd started.

She covered Mark with the afghan his mother had made them as a wedding gift. The spinach smelled like earth, like buried things. Somewhere in the apartment, her phone began ringing again.