The silhouette cutter

Original fiction extract.

The silhouette cutter asked Tomas to sit sideways on the little stool. Tomas had expected a camera. Instead, the woman took a folded piece of black paper and a pair of small scissors from a tin. His mother stood behind her, trying not to smile at how carefully he had arranged his hair.

The scissors began a quiet, biting conversation with the paper. The cutter scarcely looked down. Her eyes travelled from Tomas’s forehead to his chin and back again, while a narrow black ribbon curled towards her lap. He felt his face being taken apart without anyone touching it. A curl, a step, a tiny turn: the scissor points seemed to know the outline before the paper did. Then she opened the fold. Two small strangers faced away from one another, each wearing his nose with an accuracy he found almost rude.

His mother bought both. Tomas asked to keep the ribbon which had fallen away, but it had already broken into pieces. On the bus, he held one portrait against the window. His reflection looked back through it, fuller and less exact. He turned sideways to compare them and caught his mother watching.

Choose three powerful words or phrases from the extract above. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the cutter’s skill and the sitter’s reaction.

Write about 200 to 250 words.