The Bull Market of Lost Souls

Marcus stood on the trading floor at 3:17 AM, feeling like the corporate undead after his fourth consecutive night without sleep. The screens glowed with impossible red numbers, and somewhere beneath the fluorescent hum, he realized he'd become what his younger self would have despised: a **zombie** in a tailored suit, mechanically executing trades he no longer believed in.

His feet began moving before his mind registered the impulse. **Running** down Forty-second Street at dawn, past the exhausted-looking hookers and the last stumbling drunks, he felt strangely alive for the first time in three years. His analyst had called him **bullish** that morning—confidently predicting the market would turn, everything would recover, keep holding, keep believing. But Marcus had stopped believing in anything beyond the immediate sensation of his sneakers hitting pavement.

The woman on the bridge looked ready to jump. He didn't think; he didn't strategize; he didn't calculate risk. He just grabbed her arm, and she turned to face him with eyes that held the same dead exhaustion he'd seen in his mirror that morning.

"The market collapsed," she said, as if explaining something obvious.

"I know," he said, and somehow they were both laughing, this stranger in a torn evening gown and the corporate zombie in his thousand-dollar suit, watching the sunrise over a city that had already decided to forget them.

"My name's Elena," she said finally.

"Marcus," he replied. "I was running from something. I think I found it."

"Me too," she said, and he couldn't tell if she meant the suicide or the salvation, but he took her hand anyway and together they walked away from the ledge, leaving the bullish promises and zombie dreams to burn themselves out in the first real light of day.