The Last Bull Run

The hat sat on the corner of Marcus's desk — a vintage fedora, leather sweat-stained, belonging to a version of himself he'd buried somewhere around 2008. Three P.M. on a Friday and the trading floor was already half-empty, the survivors moving with that peculiar shambling gait of the corporate undead, eyes glazed, souls deferred.

"You look like shit, Marcus." Elena from compliance leaned against his cubicle wall, coffee in hand, wedding ring conspicuously absent these past two months. "Come out tonight?"

He should say yes. They'd been dancing around whatever this was for six months, since the Christmas party where she'd cried into her martini about her husband's affair. But Marcus felt something fundamental hollowing out inside him, a metabolic

zombie

state where desire itself had begun to atrophy.

"Can't. Working on the Richardson pitch."

"The dead deal? Marcus, that thing's been

bull

market fiction for three quarters. Everyone knows it."

"Management wants it delivered Monday."

She studied him, something like pity in her eyes. "You know what you are? You're that guy who keeps showing up to a burning house with a garden hose, pretending you can still save something."

She was right, of course. The Richardson account had been terminally ill since February. The whole sector was hemorrhaging. But Marcus kept showing up, kept updating spreadsheets that no one read, kept attending meetings where they discussed strategies for markets that no longer existed. He was

bull

ish on nothing, bearish on everything, moving through days that had blurred into an indistinguishable gray loop of spreadsheets and bad coffee and Elena's increasingly desperate invitations.

"My father wore this

hat

," he said, picking it up, turning it over in his hands. "Stockbroker. Nineties. Died of a heart attack at fifty-two, right at his desk." He looked up at her. "I'm forty-eight, Elena."

"So take it off." She reached across the desk, her hand covering his. "The

hat

. The job. The performance of being fine. Just take it off."

The trading floor had gone silent. Somewhere, a phone began to ring. Marcus thought about Richardson, about the spreadsheets, about the promotion that might come if he just delivered one more dead deal, kept his head down, kept

bull

ishing away the obvious.

He set the

hat

on his head. It fit perfectly, like something he'd been waiting his whole life to grow into.

"You know what?" Marcus stood up. "Fuck the pitch."

Elena's smile was the first real thing he'd seen in this room in years. "There's a world outside,

zombie

boy. Let's go find it."