‘Martha?’ Miz Monroe is at my side, her hot rough hand pushing my hair outta my eyes, and I can’t focus on her.

‘I don’t feel good,’ I say. I hear her laugh a little.

‘I can see that,’ she says, and then her feet clatter past me and I hear her voice booming into the church.

‘Hallie Salter, your Martha ain’t feeling well. You’d best get along out here.’ Then it’s all commotion and confusion and Pa’s jacket rubbing against my hot skin again as he carries me to the truck, which is burning hot now and I fight to stay in the air, and Ma fretting on weeping. I keep saying ‘I’s fine,’ but seems no one can hear me over their own noise, so I shuts my mouth as well as my eyes, and let them fret. Can’t stop them.

A novella, really. This was a lockdown project; unable to concentrate on the novel in progress (A Gift of Time), I went back to my shorts file and started polishing them – this one wouldn’t get finished, and became, like the unruly child at the heart of it, wilful and growing.

Set in the Dust Bowl era on the border between Oklahoma and Kansas, Martha Rae Salter grows up with people she thinks are her parents, in a small town of people she trusts, but she is wrong on both counts.