The Bull Market of Empty Days

Maya hit the padel ball against the glass wall, again and again, the thwack-thwack-thwack echoing in the empty court at 11 PM. Her corporate card paid for this premium membership just as it paid for the dinners she didn't eat and the clothes she didn't need.

"You're playing like a zombie tonight," Richard had said earlier, declining to join her. Richard, who still believed in things—believed the bull market would last forever, believed their marriage wasn't hollow, believed his bonus would somehow fill the spaces between them.

She'd smiled at the word: zombie. Because wasn't that exactly what they'd become? Living dead walking through granite-floored lobbies, trading stocks they didn't understand for reasons they'd forgotten, consuming and copulating and congratulating themselves on lives they didn't actually enjoy.

The ball came at her and she missed, and it struck her ankle—hard. She sat on the court floor, staring at her reflection in the glass. The woman staring back wore a suit that cost more than her mother made in a month, but her eyes were dead, dead, dead.

"It's a bull market, Maya," Richard told everyone at parties. "We have to ride it."

What he meant was: they had to keep working the jobs that drained them. Had to maintain the apartment that felt like a hotel. Had to stay married because divorce was bearish for networking.

The padel ball rolled toward her, coming to rest against her heel. She picked it up, fingers pressing into the rubber. A thought crystallized, sharp and bright as breaking glass: she didn't have to play anymore.

She stood slowly, ankle throbbing, and walked out of the court, leaving the ball behind.

The divorce papers were waiting at home on the kitchen island, next to Richard's Bloomberg Terminal glowing green—green for go, green for profit, green for everything they were supposed to want.

He looked up as she entered, exhausted from another twelve-hour day.

"How was padel?" he asked.

"I quit," she said.

He laughed, that tired hollow laugh. "The sport or the metaphor?"

"Both."

The silence that followed was the first honest thing between them in three years. Outside, the city skyline burned with artificial light, full of zombies riding the bull market toward cliffs they couldn't see, wouldn't see, until they fell.

She picked up the pen. Someone had to be the first to wake up.