The bolt of saffron silk was the first to betray her. Elara had spent all of Tuesday coaxing the exact shade of a sunrise over the Salt Flats from her dye pot. It was a perfect, luminous yellow, humming with warmth. She’d hung it to dry on the cedar rack, her heart a little lighter. But when she returned on Wednesday morning, the silk was a sour, jaundiced mustard. Not faded. Changed. As if it had always been that color.
She held it to the light, her knuckles white. She remembered the saffron. She remembered the smell of the turmeric and marigold she’d used. This sickly yellow felt like a stranger in her workshop.
“You’re brooding over a bad batch,” Kael said, leaning against the doorframe that afternoon. He had a way of appearing, all effortless charm and a smile that made the air feel warmer. It was the kind of charisma people were starting to call *rizz*, and Elara was not immune. “It happens to every artist.”
“It wasn’t a bad batch,” she said, her voice tight. “It was right yesterday.”
He laughed, a gentle sound meant to soothe. “You’re getting a little *delulu*, El. It’s a beautiful mustard.”
He was *gaslighting* her, she thought, though the word felt too harsh for his soft tone. He was simply stating his reality, which, terrifyingly, was everyone’s reality but hers. It was a cosmic gaslighting she couldn’t fight.
They were in a *situationship*, that was the modern word for it. They shared wine and secrets under the moon, but never breakfast. He existed in the definite present, while she was becoming untethered from the past.
It started happening more. The cerulean blue of the harbor in a painting she’d loved for years was, overnight, a dull, muddy teal. The scarlet of the geraniums in her window box bled into a flat, unremarkable red. No one else noticed. When she pointed it out, they would look at her with pity, as if she were a child insisting her invisible friend was real.
She began to document. She’d paint a swatch of color on a piece of parchment, write the date, and seal it in a light-proof wooden box. But when she’d open the box a day later, the color on the parchment would match the changed object, not her memory of it. Yesterday was actively rewriting itself, and it was taking her proof with it.
“You have this… *main character energy*, you know?” Kael told her one night, after she’d tried to explain the shifting color of the evening sky. “Like the world has to have some secret, personal meaning just for you.” He’d meant it to be a teasing observation, but it felt like a diagnosis. She went home and ate crackers and a handful of olives for dinner, a sad little *girl dinner* for one.
She was entering a new, paranoid *era*. She distrusted her own eyes. The *vibes* of the whole town felt off-kilter, a symphony where one instrument was consistently out of tune, but only she could hear it.
The final straw was the town’s Midsummer Festival. She’d seen Kael standing by the fountain, laughing with his friends. The light from the paper lanterns cast a golden glow on his face, a glow she found herself memorizing, trying to brand into her mind. The next day, she saw one of his friends in the market.
“Kael was in his element last night, wasn’t he?” Elara said, trying to sound casual.
The friend smiled. “He was. That strange green light from the lanterns made everyone look like kelpies.”
Green.
The word hit her like a physical blow. Not gold. Green. The memory of Kael’s face, so warm and vital, curdled in her mind. The golden charm became a sickly, reptilian sheen. And with that single, visceral shift, she felt it—a sudden, profound recoil. *The ick*. It was no longer just about color. It was about trust, about shared reality. His inability to see what she saw had been a gentle dismissal; now it felt like a fundamental incompatibility, a chasm.
She went back to her workshop, past the rack of mustard-colored silk. She looked at her pots of dye, the madder and the indigo and the weld. They were just colors. They held no promises. Yesterday’s hue was a lie. Tomorrow’s was a mystery.
She stopped trying to preserve. She stopped trying to prove.
Instead, she began to create for the moment. She’d dye a scarf in a brilliant lapis, knowing it might be the color of ash by morning, and she’d sell it that day, a fleeting captured beauty. Her art became ephemeral, a performance. She was no longer a historian of color, but a poet of its passing.
She let the thing with Kael dissolve without a word. There was nothing to say. They lived in different worlds, his one of solid, dependable yesterdays, and hers one of constant, vibrant revision.
That evening, she took out a fresh canvas. She didn’t know what would become of it. The past was unstable, a story that changed with each telling. All she had was the now. She dipped her brush into a pot of startling magenta, knowing that by morning, it might be the color of mourning, or of kings, or of nothing she had a name for yet. And that was all right.
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