Frosted Apricot

flash fiction by Penny Jackson

She finds it by accident—wedged in the velvet dark of an old purse, buried beneath balled tissues, soft mints turned to ghosts, a pencil chewed to its bones. The lipstick.

The label is worn away, but her fingers know it. A relic. A breath caught in wax.

She doesn’t pause. Just twists the tube, draws it across her lips. It scrapes—grainy, dry, the texture of forgotten sand. She flinches. Then looks.

In the mirror: a bloom.

A pale, sherbet hue. Not quite pink. Not quite orange. Like the last blush of daylight before the world exhales. A color shaped by warm evenings and dusk-laced laughter.

And there, inside that reflection—her mother.

Not a ghost, not exactly. But something near it. A flare of memory caught in gloss.

Frosted Apricot.

The words arrive like a scent, unbidden. Estee Lauder. Her mother’s anthem. Her flare of light. She had hunted it in unfamiliar cities, as if chasing a vanishing spell—moving through perfume counters with the urgency of a pilgrim.