Suspended Over the Bull Run

Elias hung from the cable like something forgotten, forty stories above the financial district. The wind up here had teeth. Below him, the bull run of '24 had turned every suit into a gambler, every trading floor into a temple to momentum they'd pretend was strategy. He could almost smell the desperation through the glass—that particular scent of men who'd confused being right with being rich.

She was down there somewhere. Sarah. The one who'd smile at him from the forty-third floor breakroom window, the one whose whispered phone calls about her bear market fears had become the only thing that made the precarious sway of his daily work feel like something like grace.

"Bear markets are just corrections," she'd told him last week, her voice crackling over his phone while he'd hung suspended between buildings, his safety cable the only thing between him and the pavement. "They're just the market catching its breath before the next run."

He'd wanted to ask if people worked like that too—if you could just call a divorce, a lonely childhood in a rust belt town, thirty years of replacing cables other people forgot existed—call it all a correction, a pause before the real living began. But he'd just watched the cable fiber slicing through his gloves and said he hoped she was right.

Today her window was dark. He learned later she'd been laid off when the fund's algorithm misread a correction as a collapse. Someone else's bear had become her problem. The bull run had trampled her and kept moving.

He finished the splice and descended toward the street, his cable singing with tension, thinking how some people swung from silk threads and others from steel, but in the end, gravity never much cared which was which. The market would rise again. The next Sarah would watch him from another window. The cable would hold. It always held. That was the terrible part.