The glass roof

Source: an original fiction extract.

“The storm reached the shopping arcade at closing time. Nessa was pulling the shutters across her uncle's flower stall when the first hailstones struck the glass roof. Beyond the entrance, people ran across the square with bags held over their heads. The security guard, Mr Bell, asked everyone still inside to stay away from the doors. Nessa had left her phone charging in the shop behind the stall. She could see its green cable through the half-closed shutter.

Above her, the hail quickened from scattered taps to a furious drumming. The roof became a pale, trembling skin. Water crowded the gutters and spilled in twisting ropes between the stalls. A sign advertising summer shoes swung from its chains with absurd cheerfulness. Each flash of lightning bleached the arcade flat and white; in the darkness that followed, the shops seemed to move farther away.

Nessa lifted the shutter enough to crawl beneath it. Her uncle would be trying to call. Inside the shop, the phone lay beside a bucket of lilies, its screen bright with a message she could not read from the door. Then Mr Bell shouted her name. She looked back. A crack had appeared in the panel of glass directly above the stall. It was very small, like a hair caught against the sky. She took another step towards the phone.

The sound came before she understood it: a sharp report, then the rushing collapse of something that had seemed solid. Mr Bell caught her sleeve and pulled her behind the brick pillar. Glass struck the floor where the buckets had stood. Nessa crouched with her arms over her head. For several seconds the storm seemed to be inside the building, touching everything. When she looked up, a white lily lay on the tiles beside her shoe. Its stem was still inside the broken neck of a vase.

Mr Bell asked if she could stand. Nessa nodded, although her knees shook as they crossed to the café at the other end of the arcade. Someone brought a chair. Through the rain falling into the ruined stall, she could see the phone's green cable hanging from the counter. It looked ridiculously thin. Mr Bell offered her his own phone, and she called her uncle before trying to explain to herself why she had not stopped.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the storm’s overwhelming effect on the arcade. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.