The loom starts

Original fiction extract.

My aunt checked the threads twice before starting the loom. I had imagined that weaving began with a cloth already visible, something the machine merely lengthened. Instead, the frame held a taut confusion of separate lines. She placed my hand on the finished sample hanging beside it, then asked me to watch the empty space in front of her.

The first beat landed like a firm knock on a closed door. Threads parted in a narrow corridor, and the shuttle flashed through before the passage shut. Again the knock; again the small bright journey. Gradually, colour gathered at the edge of the frame, a low tide coming in so slowly that I noticed its arrival only when it had covered the bare strip beneath. What had looked like a cage of lines began to hold a surface. My aunt’s feet kept their quiet argument with the pedals while her hands moved above them, answering in another language.

When she stopped, the room did not become silent at once. The pattern of the knocks continued somewhere in my hearing. I looked from the growing cloth to the sample beside it and finally understood why she had shown me both.

Choose three powerful words or phrases from the extract above. Analyse how the writer uses language to convey the narrator’s experience of watching the loom begin work.

Write about 200 to 250 words.