Colour had already filled the room before the camera arrived.

Pastels and pigment sat on her skin the way they sat on the canvas — no clear line between the two. The hand came into focus before the face did, as if the work itself had stepped forward to be looked at first.

This was a world already alive in the hours it had managed to claim for itself. Nothing needed arranging; the colours had been doing their work long before I started looking.

She wasn't posing for a photograph. She was simply caught mid-thought, hand raised, still half inside whatever she'd been making.