‘Paper, Candles, Hearts, and Other Combustible Materials’ by Anne Baldo

Cedar can’t sleep. The hotel room is so cold it hurts. Franco over dinner earlier, at the casino’s steakhouse, knife half-sunk in a slab of charred octopus, a thorny salad on the side, saying Maybe you need to see a doctor. But Cedar had. The doctor and his clean, even nails, medicinal cologne: — bloodroot and crushed aspirin — flicking a prescription slip, his eyes never leaving the screen of the laptop as he quickly clicked the keys. A bottle of pills, take twice daily for nerves. She swallowed them for a week, and hated them: the way they muddled her, left her sluggish and damp. So stunned she couldn’t catch her own thoughts long enough to dwell on anything. They lumbered slowly on, drowsy sheep, but just ahead of her always, leaving her mind a flat, empty field. A void is not peace. Nothingness is not the same as happiness. She threw the pills out. Because you always want the quick fix, Franco says.