There is a woman, an artist, who has come home to find people brutally murdered in her apartment on at least three separate occasions. Then she has looked down to find blood all over the front of her clothes. Each time, she’s called the police, hysterical, and each time they came to her apartment, investigated, questioned her involvement, and ultimately cleared her of any wrongdoing. She doesn’t know why they believe her when she tells them that she doesn’t know how the blood got all over her clothes, or why they honestly believe that the same situation happening three or four times is really a coincidence. She knows that it’s unlikely that she had nothing to do with it, in spite of the fact that she doesn’t remember anything more about it other than coming home and finding the gruesome scene in her living room.
She paints and writes about this, partly to keep herself from going crazy. (“Maybe I’m crazy already,” she thinks.) One day she notices that she has stopped writing in any color of pen except red, and that red paint dominates most of her paintings. She starts to cry.
She doesn’t have a lot of friends and none of them ever come to her apartment. Nevertheless, she starts to find unsettling notes from someone else, written to her, in red ink, in her own handwriting. After that she stops going out of the apartment at all for fear of coming home to bloody corpses.
Then she starts to find hand-written dialogues between two people, both in her handwriting. One side of the dialogue is in black; she remembers writing that. The other is in red, which she does not remember. Now she only paints the scenes in her mind, the murdered people she’s found in her living room so many times, and herself in bloody clothes, always different colors of outfits. She had never realized that before but now she stops wearing any colors except those she was wearing on those horrible days.
She has a vague sense of people getting worried about her and coming over to talk to her, but it’s like a dream; she doesn’t really hear them, and though she hears herself responding to their words from time to time she doesn’t really know what she’s saying or understand the gist of the conversation. Anyway they’re always gone soon so it doesn’t really matter.
Then she wakes up one day to find a group of people standing around her living room, which is empty except for her canvases (she got rid of all the furniture with blood on it, which was pretty much everything). They say that she has been found guilty of murder and must now be executed, once for every murder she committed, in the same way as she murdered that victim, and wearing the clothes she herself was wearing on that occasion.
She begins to sob, hysterically, afraid they’re right, angry that she didn’t see this coming, somewhat confused about how they’re going to execute her more than once. (“Does it really matter, though?” she thinks.) But once is all it takes, and while she lays dying on the floor she realizes the truth—she wasn’t crazy; she was being framed, and now whoever it was that was framing her has finally won.