In the little pastry shop on the corner of East and 7th, Anna twirled a sugar rose in her fingers. “You know,” she said, letting the light catch the sugary petals, “I always thought life’s a bit like a fire extinguisher.”

Alex looked up from his sketchpad, brow arched high. “How’s that? Ineffective in a real emergency?”

Anna chuckled, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “Not quite. More like—it promises to put out flames, but it’s just a neatly packaged lie. Full of bluff.”

It was perhaps the absurdity of life’s disappointments, neatly wrapped in Anna’s whimsical comparison, that caught Alex off-guard. Her eyes glinted with that Wang Xiaobo-esque humor, layered and complex. It was the kind of wit that laced conversations with something beautiful, yet undeniably heavy.

“You’re not dreaming of a fire in here, are you?” he teased, gesturing around the shop packed with delicate confections and glass showcases. “This place would go up in seconds.”

She shrugged, somewhat dramatically, eyeing a customer inspecting éclairs. “There’s something romantic about a big blaze, don’t you think? The end of one chapter, eagerly scribbling to start another.”

Alex smirked, savoring the paradoxical intimacy of such morbidity. He closed his sketchpad, leaning forward. “I’d say you’ve got a pyromaniac’s heart, but those roses tell a different tale.”

Anna’s laughter was like sugar granules dancing, sweet yet with an unexpected edge. “No, I just have a tendency to see under the surface of things. Like… that extinguisher there.” She nodded toward the bright red canister in the corner, a silent guardian with secrets of its own.

“A mockery of safety,” she added, with a wink.

In the ebb and flow of patrons, the shop continued its rhythm, steady as a beating heart. Alex’s sketches, a melange of profiles and pastries, bore the marks of his conversations with Anna — angular lines given warmth through their banter. The counter was a stage, yet with enough pretense to conceal its actors’ truths.

“Do you ever think about slipping away?” Alex asked suddenly, voice barely above a whisper.

Anna paused, the rose forgotten in her hands. “Sometimes. But I’m afraid wherever I go, I might find another cardboard fire extinguisher.”

“Or a real one,” he murmured, almost as an afterthought.

Their eyes met, a silent exchange like a page yet unwritten. The thought lingered — life’s promises were often fake, yet within each facade, there lay a tender wish for authenticity. It was Anna’s subtle way of suggesting escape, a daring leap into the unknown where perhaps, beyond the false promises, a genuine kind of fire burned.

“And if you found a real one?” Anna asked, her voice softening into something unexpectedly vulnerable.

“We’d start again,” Alex replied, words carrying dreams unspoken.

As the shop bell chimed, the world folded over once more — customers walked in and out, seeking their fleeting joy in sugar and cream, oblivious to the tapestry woven beyond their gaze.

Anna smiled, setting aside her sugar rose. “You should draw it sometime—the illusion. It’d be a shame not to capture it.”

Alex nodded, opening his sketchpad once more. With deliberate strokes, he began etching lines that told a story of imagined fires and false extinguishers. They were actors in their own play, writing scripts in glances and whispered words, yet always leaving the ending muted, much like life itself.

With the curtain drawn for the night, the once-bustling shop was silent, the only witness to an unspoken promise held within an extinguishing, flickering flame.