Think of the way a storm disturbs you. How it rattles your bones and awakens every primitive urge to battle with it, lose yourself in its force. Listen to thunder shaking the world and lightning slicing apart a jagged sky.

The woman has not seen one in longer than a year, only through the little crosshatched window where moonlight slides through the blinds. The last thunderclouds she saw were the yellow of a jaundiced eye- or simply the precise hue of the creamy yellow gown she crafts. The woman sews within a cloudy sweep of fabrics, isolated from the world in her shed, and listens to the clouds blowing past like the troop of years. Her face is veiled in a trailing scarf, patterned with flowers that seem to shift and turn, though her hands are so nimble- weaving dresses that sweep to the grimy floor. The woman loses herself in herself in the rhythms of the sewing machine that hums as if awaiting her ministrations. She pretends: the girl wearing this dress will dab herself in perfumes that swirl around her like mist. She will drape herself in her painstakingly made clothes. She will live and love in that jewel-coloured stretch of cloth until it fades away. When she sends a piece to the warehouse, she feels a throb of pain parting with all those future memories, almost like love.

This storehouse is her cage. It is filled with dusty gardening equipment and a window that opens onto a garden so lush that the woman forgets herself for a moment, yearning to fling aside her veil. To step outside. Every day before she raises up a hundred gowns in multitudinous hues, she stands in front of the leaky light that seeps through the window and longs to salute the sun. To feel the wash of light that inspires the colours surrounding her. She imagines other’s lives like the glow in neighbour’s windows, torch after torch like the heralds of war, lighting the dark. Alive, and vibrant.

Sometimes, the woman wakes up feverish, unable to know herself. She dreams of the inferno and the grotesque crosshatching down her cheek. She remembers how people gazed at her like Frankenstein’s monster. When she wakes up, her eyes are dry. The shed is her life now. Yet in her imaginings she walks the familiar paths again and is a relative to the twitter of the birds, their chorus lines and glory, the way they string themselves on poles as if forming a necklace while twilight glows behind. She stops to smell the roses threading through her garden, where spider’s webs glimmer with dew like a spill of jewels. She knows the vivid blue of the sky as more than a memory.

The same sleepless dreams come, as the night wraps her in its embrace and the moon is a shard of glass on her cheek. Listen to the whistle of the logs as they catch flame and conflagration crimson, apricot, flying gold. The sputter of embers as they drift into the midnight sky. The woman had been daring once. It was the night of the graduation, and the world was a feast before her. The scent of marshmallows and chocolate wafted on the wind.

Instead, she had become a ghost of herself, with darkened eyes and driftwood bones, haunting the storehouse. It is a sanctuary, she tells herself, in the hidden language of hope she had known. I can be at peace. No-one will see how I struggle to hide my face, because that’s where pity blooms.

But the woman knows a tomb when she sees one.

Five years she has spent over the bolts and shreds of fabric, surrounded by colours pooling around her feet. Five years, where she has refused to embrace the darkness within her.

Look again, then, and you might miss the girl losing her step and plunging into the open fire. She burns and burns, and ashes swirl around her like flakes of snow. Her mouth opens around something: a name, a cry, a plea. Look how she loses herself in the flames.