'Taking it With You' by Daniel Prokop

Chapter 1

"After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice, than it is to be born once.” ~ Voltaire

 Chapter 1

 The sound of the clock steals into Faith McCormack’s awareness, robbing focus from the numbers that cascade across an impressive bank of computer screens. Concentration broken, Faith promptly assumes the exhausted posture that she knows too well. Bracing her elbows on the polished mahogany of the desk she slumps forward. The palms of her hands support her head.

 Without thinking she rubs her palms into her tired eyes. Suddenly she snaps upright. Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! She stares at the smudged make-up on her hands. The exorbitantly expensive cosmetics no longer conceal the unwelcome black bags that lurk below her green irises. Double bugger!

 The damage already done, she resumes her position. Faith takes a precious moment, to just stare into the nothingness behind her eyelids. The only sound is the clock, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, slow and steady, relentless.  “Every tick is a tiny debit against one’s lifespan, correction, my lifespan.”

God, how morbid.

Where did that come from? Faith has no time for this kind of thinking and the full irony of that is not wasted. “When did I ever have time?” she wonders.

 When Faith lifts her head she sees the clock, her clock, her trophy. It was the pièce de résistance of an office that looked down on the glass ceiling. No other woman had reached the rarified heights that Faith McCormack had.

 The clock is an exact replica of the clock that dominates the largest open outcry trading floor in the world. Just as the clock dominates the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, so Faith dominates commodity trading in currencies, oil and of course her shiny favorite, gold.

 The second hand moves brazenly towards the twelve, unaware of the chaos, semi-organized chaos, that it is about to unleash many floors below. The first chime sends Faith back 18 years earlier.

On the trading floor a young Faith stops trying to adjust the bright silk jacket that is too tight and looks up at the chiming clock. Raven-sized carnivorous butterflies peck at the lining of her stomach but she is ready to start making her fortune, more than ready. She would grasp this opportunity with both hands, her feet and any other part of her anatomy that was required.

 Faith had vowed that she would never, ever, be poor again, never. Faith would die before going back to the streets. Being destitute in America was soul destroying and, in Chicago, it was also freezing.

In Faith’s darkest and almost final hour she had seen the light, had been blinded by it, temporarily. To this day she did not know why she had looked up from the poised pile of sleeping pills held in her icy hand. As she lifted her eyes, the sun had burst through the clouds. The polished glass of the Mercantile reflected and magnified the golden rays searing Faith’s being.

 The flash of light broke the spell of suicide woven by the ghosts of a painful past. A deep rage was sparked within her and Faith was transformed from victim to predator. The market had called her and she had responded. She could not explain it and had never tried.

 Before the echo of the last chime fades Faith looks eagerly, and somewhat naively, around for trading opportunities. Of course, as a newbie, she starts at the bottom of the pit, the quietest part of the pit, the part of the pit furthest from easy action. Trading pits are aptly named. They are a cesspool of testosterone, cigarette smoke, foul BO and fouler language.

 The gold pit is the largest pit at the Mercantile, holding over 200 traders, but it is not buzzing that fateful morning. Desperate to start her career, Faith hustles and shouts tirelessly in a vain attempt to make her first trade, two whole contracts. “God, what a joke”, she thinks. Nervous about two contracts, but it was a lot back then and she hadn’t eaten for days. Faith was hungrier than anyone else in the pit.