The masked practice

Original fiction extract.

The two fencers lowered their masks at opposite ends of the practice area. Without their faces, I found them harder to distinguish. One wore a red mark on her glove. The other had a small tear in the cloth at his shoulder. The coach stood beside me with her hands folded, watching their feet.

For several seconds, their blades wrote nothing but questions in the air. A wrist shifted; a shoe whispered backwards. The space between them tightened like an invisible string. Then the red glove flew forward, and the stillness broke into a handful of silver flashes. I heard the quick, dry answer of metal against metal but could not follow which blade had begun it. Almost at once they were apart again. Their shoulders rose and fell beneath the white jackets, the only large movement left after the exchange.

The coach asked them to repeat a passage more slowly. This time I saw a small turn of the wrist which I had mistaken for a pause. When they stopped, the fencer with the red glove lifted her mask. Her face was ordinary and flushed. The space before her seemed empty now, though a moment earlier I had been watching it as closely as either blade.

Choose three powerful words or phrases from the extract above. Analyse how the writer uses language to convey the movement and concentration of the fencers.

Write about 200 to 250 words.