The Last Lipstick Factory

First, the sky forgot how to hold blue. It started at the horizons, a slow leaching of color like wet paper left in sun. Then the fade crept upward, until even noon became an exercise in shades of ash. Birds flew through increasingly monochrome heavens, their own feathers dulling in sympathy.

The gardens went next. Roses surrendered their red one petal at a time, until they stood like ghosts in their beds. Sunflowers bowed their heads, their yellow hearts growing dim. Even the greenest leaves turned themselves to graphite sketches, as if nature had decided to work only in charcoal.

Cities followed suit, their bright signs flickering into grayscale. Traffic lights became exercises in luminosity rather than color. Children’s drawings showed houses in careful gradations of gray, their memories of purple and orange already fading like old photographs.

They blamed climate change, pollution, mass hysteria. Politicians argued about particulate levels while the last orange sunset bled itself white. Scientists measured the spectrum’s decay in careful increments, graphing the disappearance of indigo, the slow death of vermillion.

But here, in the last lipstick factory, we have become living museums of color. We eat the shades to save them, each one distinct on the tongue. Ruby Twilight tastes like copper pennies dissolving under thunderclouds. Midnight Kiss leaves traces of dark chocolate and static electricity. Coral Dawn burns like citrus and summer memories pressed between book pages.

I met Jules during the week crimson began to fade from the world. She was testing a batch of Passion’s Promise, her mouth stained the color of secrets. When she smiled, her teeth were painted in sunset. I was working with Violet Dreams, my fingers dipped in crushed nebulae. Our first kiss created a color that had never existed before, one that tasted of meteor showers and first love.

We learned each other in colors. Jules’ laugh contains traces of long-lost turquoise. Her tears leave tiny pearls of rose gold that we collect in glass vials. When she sleeps, her dreams project themselves on the ceiling in shades that haven’t been named yet. I press my pigment-stained fingers against her skin, and we create temporary galaxies in extinct spectrums.

The factory owners don’t understand why production keeps dropping, why each batch yields less than the last. They install cameras, implement random searches. They don’t realize we’re becoming living palettes, our bodies galleries of dying hues. Every kiss between us tastes like a different shade of defiance.

At night, Jules writes poems on my skin in ultraviolet. I tell her stories in infrared. Our bodies have become dictionaries of lost colors: her veins run cerulean, my palms hold the last perfect shade of dawn. When we press our hands together, we create auroras.

We know it’s killing us slowly. Color wasn’t meant to live in human bodies. But we can’t stop consuming every shade, hiding them under our tongues like secrets. Yesterday, Jules cried seven perfect spheres of ruby that rolled across the floor like tiny planets. Last night, I caught her writing love letters in a blue that hasn’t existed since the Renaissance.

The security guards are starting to notice how we glow faintly in dark corners, how our shadows fall in impossible hues. Soon they’ll realize what we’ve done. But by then, we’ll be walking galleries of lost colors, our blood a museum of forgotten shades. And when the last lipstick rolls off the production line, when the final tube of Ruby Twilight is sealed and sold, Jules and I will still have every color ever made hidden in the space between our mouths, ready to paint the world again.