The Last Bull Run

The hair on Marcus's arms stood up as the server room's air conditioning died for the third time that week. At 2 AM, he was the only one left in the office, monitoring the migration that should've finished six hours ago. The cable management system—a rat's nest of fiber optics and copper that he'd been meaning to reorganize for months—was now his enemy.

His phone buzzed. Sarah.

"You coming home?"

"Soon. This migration is a disaster."

"It's always a disaster with you, Marc. That's the problem."

She wasn't wrong. Their marriage had been on life support since his promotion—a "bull run" opportunity that demanded 80-hour weeks and carried him away from everything that mattered. The money was good. The hollow ache in his chest, less so.

"Just give me another hour."

"I stopped waiting an hour ago."

The call ended. Marcus stared at the cable snaking across the floor, a physical manifestation of everything he'd neglected. He remembered how Sarah used to run her fingers through his hair when they lay in bed, back when intimacy wasn't scheduled like a quarterly review. Now his hair was thinning, gray at the temples, much like the cables—once pristine, now fraying at the edges.

The server rack blinked at him accusingly. Somewhere in this mess of cable and code and bullshit corporate promises, he'd lost the thread. He could fix the migration. He couldn't fix this.

His hands shook as he reached for the keyboard. The real bull run wasn't the market or the career ladder. It was the way he kept charging toward things that would eventually gore him.

Marcus stood up. Left the migration running. Walked out into the night.