Ascorbic Acid and Screen Light

The iphone glowed at 3:14 AM, a message notification that shouldn't have been there. Sarah's heart ran a jagged rhythm against her ribs as she reached for it, her fingers trembling. "Can't stop thinking about last night." The screen illuminated her husband's sleeping face beside him, peaceful and oblivious.

She slipped out of bed and grabbed her running shoes from the closet. This had become her ritual — running away from problems she couldn't solve, pumping arms and legs until the physical exhaustion drowned out the emotional ache. The streets of their gentrifying neighborhood were empty at this hour, the only light coming from sporadic streetlamps and the neon sign of the bodega on the corner.

Inside, the clerk was asleep behind the counter. Sarah grabbed an orange from the produce bin — slightly overripe, its skin dimpled like old skin. She thought about her mother, how she'd always said vitamin C was the cure for everything. Colds, heartbreak, existential dread. Just take your vitamins and keep moving.

She bit into the orange as she walked home, juice dripping down her chin, sticky and sour. The vitamin label on the supplements in her medicine cabinet promised immune support, but nothing about how to survive the slow death of a twelve-year marriage. Nothing about how to ask your husband why someone else couldn't stop thinking about him without shattering everything.

When she returned, David was awake. "Where did you go?" he asked, eyes searching hers in the darkness.

"For a run," she said, her mouth still tasting of citrus and lies. "I couldn't sleep."

He pulled her close, and she let him, even as she felt the iphone burning in her pocket like a coal of untreated fire. Sometimes the thing you needed most was the thing that would destroy you. Like how scurvy was cured by something as simple as an orange, but only if you were willing to admit you were sick in the first place.