Amelia opens her eyes; wrenches her eyelids apart, breaking the crust that has glued them together, only to find the sun staring back at her. She can’t see for the brightness, even as she twists her neck to avoid its gaze. She closes her eyes quickly but it has been burnt into her retinas.

She doesn’t remember how she got here, or even where here is. She tries to focus on remembering, but her head is searing from the sun and about to boil over. Her skin feels raw, exposed; every breeze sends a stinging whip up her arms.

She can’t hear anything. Or rather, her ears are ringing. Shrill sounds, alien, distant, wrong sounds fill up her head. She clenches her teeth and tastes something metallic.

The sounds are growing louder, they are making her head split down the middle. She tries covering her ears with her hands, but the sounds continue to swell and her wet hands are sliding around as if on ice.

The noise, the sun, and the wetness overwhelm Amelia. Everything feels wrong and her memory loss is making her dizzy.

The last thing she remembers: sitting at her desk. It had not been so bright there.

Amelia works in an office. A dull one. An anonymous advertising agency where she is an underpaid assistant. The last thing she remembers: trying to carefully word an email to a man heatedly demanding something or other.

Her job involves being yelled at by many people who are angry with her boss. At first it had made her outraged and upset. She had tried to solve it by talking to her boss, then her boss’s boss, then anyone higher up she could find. Soon she discovered that nobody cared.

“This is how it works,” they would say. “You just have to have thicker skin.”

Enough people over enough time say these things to you and you start to believe them. So Amelia tried to be “less sensitive”. She talked about it to her friends and family until they were bored. She argued about it in her mind until she was bored.

Eventually, she lost what little passion she had for the job. She became numb. She went through the motions mechanically and began to get good at ignoring hurtful things. To Amelia, this didn’t feel like a win. Yet, everyone congratulated her on her new “thick skin”.

Amelia’s skin doesn’t feel thick now. She begins to open her eyes again, but this time looks down, hoping to avoid the sun’s glare. She slowly pulls them apart to find that she is now looking into a body of water. Her feet, she can see, are submerged in the brightly reflective surface. She cannot feel the water on her legs.

She kicks them forward, seeing the water ripple as they move. Still, she does not feel it. She slides her hands down her legs and pinches them, noticing reddish brown liquid dripping from her fingertips, leaving painterly streaks. She pushes her hands urgently into the water to wash off the blood.

A loud shriek breaks her concentration and she turns quickly, frightened, to see a little boy or girl crying up at the sky. Looking up, Amelia sees a small balloon disappearing into the clouds. The child is making the noise, but it sounds wrong. It sounds like faulty brakes, not a human being.

Looking around Amelia notices that nothing sounds as it should. Birds chirping sound like a dial-up Internet connection, car horns are like someone beating on oil drums, and the people talking are aliens from a far off galaxy. Amelia splashes water in her ears, trying desperately to purge them of whatever is making the world so strange.

She looks down into the water, watching the blood swirling around her feet. She catches only a glimpse of her reflection. Her face is so covered in dirt and blood she hardly recognises herself.

She wipes her wet hands on her skirt. It is caked in black dust that is sandpaper to her broken hands. It is too hot, too bright, too loud, too wrong. She can’t breathe. She coughs and wretches and it strains her ears.

Without thinking, Amelia stands up, on shaky legs, dripping dirt and blood and water onto the warm sidewalk. She cannot see her shoes, and doesn’t even know if she ever had them. She looks over the water, its colours wrong too. She looks at the screaming child and the trees full of birds. She coughs again, her whole body threatening to crumble.

Taking deep breathes, or trying to, she realises that she is in a park. Grasping onto this thread, feeling her breathing become less jagged, she allows herself to believe that she is in the park nearby her office.

After a few moments she feels confident in her belief. She turns to face the direction of her office and she remembers why she is here.

Her building is nothing but a cloud of black smoke on the horizon. She feels tears begin to bubble over her eyelids and falls to the ground again. Her stomach is rumbling. Her hands, propping her up, are burning on the pavement. Thick skin isn’t enough.

She lays herself down on the pitiless ground. She lowers her arm into the warm water. Amelia watches the blood and the dirt, the tears and the sweat melt into the pond.