She was asleep when it happened, so she didn’t hear the embers collapse as the log rolled from the fireplace onto the floor. She was dreaming of escape: tearing off her apron as she ran barefoot down the long potholed driveway, past the lines of twisted apple trees and onto the gravel road that led away from here. In her sixteen years, she’d only been down that road once. It led to another world, where perhaps God was kinder and someone else helped with the jobs.

The others were asleep too, so nobody heard the clothes rack slump onto the log. Nobody noticed the flames licking at the crumpled clothes, stroking with liquid fingers, fizzing in the fibres. Nobody saw the fire ignite the faded carpet and the worn, sagging furniture, the pedestal with Father’s leather-bound Bible.

In her dreams, she was walking towards a different horizon. A carpet of trees. Shifting shadow and light.

A voice floated around her, waxing and waning, warping, disintegrating. She struggled to make out the words.

Then the voice became clearer. Her brother shouting, ‘Get up!’

Something crashed into her room and she opened her eyes. Smoke billowed like thick fog and a cough punched her chest. Her brother loomed over her, his hands rough on her shoulders, shaking her, encouraging her to move. But she couldn’t breathe. She was smoke-addled. Ragdoll loose.

An insistent sound rumbled through the house, vibrating and roaring; she felt it in her skin, in her bones, everything humming to its rhythm. The smoke had thinned and the light was surreal. Orange. Flickering.

Her brother pulled her from bed and she slumped to the floor. Around her, she heard crackling and hissing, and an evil heat radiated from the door.

Was this hell? Had God come to punish her?

Her brother hauled her across the room, wrenched open the window, and shoved her out, dropping her among the rosebushes. She landed on hands and knees, gasping, smoke scraping her chest, no air in her lungs. Thorns snagged her skin and tore at her hair as she dragged herself free.

She crawled to the driveway and hunched there, struggling against faintness until her throat released and she sucked in a lungful of air, a rasp drawn through her body.

The house was burning. Smoke poured from under the eaves, and flames clawed the sky. As she watched, a trickle of flame shimmied up the pine tree beside her bedroom, racing up the trunk, along the branches, through the needles, snapping and popping. Transfixed, she huddled, mesmerised, terrified, as the whole tree lit up.

But where was her brother? Her parents?

Stumbling to her feet, she ran around the house on the circular driveway, toes crimping on gravel.

No one.