She bent down to pick up a pillowcase and when she looked up the world turned into a dark splash of red. The bedsheets hanging from the clotheslines were scarlet and the clouds that drifted in the distance were tinted crimson. It was like gazing through a pane of colored glass in a great Gothic cathedral. Even her hands, when she looked at them, were painted a terrible shade of vermilion, as if she’d squeezed rotten cherries and let the juice drip down her arms.
