Blue on the Tongue

The wall in front of Sarah was a bastard. Two stories high, thirty feet wide, and stubbornly, mockingly white. It was supposed to be a triumph, her biggest commission to date—a sprawling narrative of the city’s forgotten waterways for the new civic center—but for weeks, it had just been this damned, mocking expanse. And all Sarah could taste was blue. Not the cool, clear blue of a summer sky. No, this was a flat, metallic blue. The color of cheap steel, maybe, or a bruise gone deep. It coated her tongue, a phantom bitterness that stuck to the back of her throat no matter how much coffee she drowned herself in.

She’d tried everything. Music, quiet, working at dawn, working until her eyes bled. Nothing. The ideas felt forced, the colors she mixed on her palette looked dull, inert. Her hands, usually so sure, felt heavy, clumsy. Each stroke was a battle, each decision a drain. This was supposed to be her breakthrough, the one that put her name on the map, and she felt like a fraud, a shell, a hollowed-out thing painting by rote memory. The blue taste lingered, a cold, empty ache behind her teeth.

Sleep was a battlefield. She’d wake up tangled in her sheets, the taste of blue now sharper, like an ice pick behind her eyes. Her studio assistant, Liam, a quiet kid with too much energy, kept asking if she needed anything. She just grunted. ‘More coffee,’ usually. He’d leave a fresh pot, a sympathetic glance, and the silence would settle again, heavy and thick with the smell of turpentine and her own mounting desperation. The deadline loomed, a predator in the periphery, and the blank wall seemed to mock her more with each passing day.

She remembered when painting felt like breathing. Back in art school, hunched over canvases in a dusty basement, the smell of oil paints intoxicating. There was a hunger then, a raw need to get what was in her head out onto something tangible. Colors spoke to her, shouted, whispered. Now, they were just pigments, numbers on a tube. The blue taste was the flavor of that lost connection, of the chasm between what she was capable of and what she was actually doing. Or, more accurately, what she wasn't doing.

One afternoon, a Tuesday maybe, or a Wednesday—days had bled together into one long, blue-tasting stretch—she snapped. A brush, stiff with dried paint, wouldn’t clean. She threw it across the studio. It hit the concrete wall with a pathetic clatter. Sarah stood there, breathing hard, chest tight. Tears pricked her eyes, not from sadness, but from pure, incandescent frustration. She wanted to scream, to rip the canvas off its frame, but the wall was solid, immovable. Just like the blue taste in her mouth. She hated it, hated herself, hated this goddamn project. She sank to the floor, head in her hands, the metallic tang of blue suffocating her.

Then, a strange thought pricked through the haze. What if? What if this blue, this bitter, cold, pervasive flavor, wasn't a block to fight? What if it was… the core? What if this mural wasn’t supposed to be bright, hopeful, celebratory? What if it needed this ache, this deep, raw current of exhaustion and silent struggle? She looked up at the wall, seeing it differently. Not as an enemy, but as an opportunity for truth.

She got up, slowly, her limbs protesting. Her mind, however, felt a sudden, fierce clarity. She picked up a huge bucket of ultramarine blue, then another of Prussian blue, and then, a tube of lamp black, the deepest black she owned. She mixed them on a makeshift palette, not gently, but with a furious, almost violent energy. It wasn't about finding the perfect shade anymore. It was about capturing the feeling. The taste. She loaded her largest brush, a worn-out house painter’s tool, and approached the wall.

The first stroke was brutal, a wide, sweeping arc of near-black blue. It wasn't clean, it wasn't delicate. It was raw, almost angry. She kept going, layering, pushing the dark blues, letting them bleed into each other, creating depths that felt like underwater chasms, like storm clouds gathering. Her back screamed, her arms burned. She worked until the light faded, until her vision blurred, until her hands were numb, paint smeared up to her elbows. She didn't stop to eat, barely stopped to drink. The taste of blue was still there, but now, it wasn't just in her mouth. It was on the wall. It was in her breath. It was becoming something else entirely.

For three days, she lived in that blue. She didn't seek inspiration; she mined her own gut. The mural grew, not with the gentle flow of forgotten rivers, but with the turbulent, powerful surge of deep currents, of hidden pressures, of the sheer, grinding force of existence. There were glimmers of other colors she’d mixed in, little flashes of murky green, hints of a bruised purple, but the blue dominated, a vast, complex, living thing. It was heavy. It was beautiful in its truth.

Finally, she stepped back. The studio was dark, save for the weak glow of a single work light. The mural stared back at her, immense and imposing. It wasn't what anyone expected, not a pretty picture. It was a churning sea, a bruised sky, a deep, silent scream. It was the taste of blue, made manifest. Sarah was shaking, bone-deep tired, her body screaming for rest. She wiped a hand across her face, smearing more paint. She could still feel that metallic tang on her tongue, but it had changed. It was still there, sure, but it was… full now. Rich. Not just bitterness, but the depth of knowing. She just stood there, breathing, watching the silent, terrible power she’d wrestled onto the wall. The wall was no longer mocking. It was simply… present. And so was she.