The Boy Who Painted Sunlight

Once, in a time not far from now, the world had faded to ash and concrete. The sky was the color of dishwater; the rivers ran heavy with metal, and the trees stood like rusted wires clawing at the clouds.

People no longer spoke of beauty. The Ministry of Order had long ago declared it dangerous — beauty stirred unrest, woke longing, inspired rebellion. Best to keep things gray, they said, best to keep them still.

But then came the boy.

He was born in a crumbling borough where the electric trains no longer ran, where people ate nutrient paste and never looked up. From the moment he could hold a stick, he scraped light onto the walls — not literal light, but something close. With chalk scavenged from old schoolyards, with fingers dipped in muddy rainbows leaking from forbidden chemical plants, he drew sunlight. Golden beams over ruined towers. Blossoms unfolding on the sides of collapsed buildings. The glow of dawn where there had been only smog.

People began to gather. Word spread, quiet as moths: There is color.

The Ministry noticed.

They came one night in their silver-gray boots, their faces hidden behind smooth, blank visors. They found the boy curled in an alley, painting a sunrise on the back of a discarded billboard. He did not resist when they took him; his mother, weeping behind a shuttered window, had always known he was not meant for their little life.

The boy was installed in the Hall of Reverence, a sleek black cube at the heart of the Ministry’s citadel. He was given paints, the finest machines, brushes of synthetic hair. His works were broadcast on the omnipresent wallscreens: golden shores, emerald forests, violet mountains — places no one had seen in generations, perhaps never.

The people watched and wept. They worked harder for the Ministry, grateful for the brief escape.

But the boy himself was blindfolded.

They told him it was to “protect the purity of his vision,” that “true genius comes from within.” His room was windowless, his meals flavorless, his guards silent. In the beginning, he remembered — the way sun feels on skin, the shimmer of rain puddles, the fiery sigh of autumn leaves. But as years passed, his memories dulled. He painted what they asked: light, color, joy. And all the while, he forgot what any of it truly meant.

Outside, the world fell further into ruin. People gathered before the wallscreens like moths before cold bulbs. They no longer tended their crumbling homes, no longer fixed the shattered machines, no longer dreamed of anything beyond the next broadcast.

One day, the boy, now grown, though still small from a life without sunlight, hesitated before the blank canvas. His hands, once so sure, trembled.

“What does yellow look like?” he whispered.

The walls recorded his every word, as they always did. Somewhere in the surveillance halls, the Minister of Order smiled thinly and made a note. “Replace the color prompts. Focus on abstraction. He no longer recalls the palette.”

The boy sat in the blind dark and tried. He drew shapes without meaning, light without warmth, suns without memory. Outside, the people watched. They sighed. They nodded. They called it profound.

Decades later, the Ministry collapsed under its own weight. Systems failed. Food grew scarce. The air turned bitter. But in homes across the dead cities, flickering on cracked screens, there still glowed the last paintings of a boy who had once remembered sunlight.

They called it hope.

They called it art.

But the boy, in his final hours, called it nothing at all, for in the end, he had forgotten even the word for light.