The silk above the floor

Original fiction extract.

The rehearsal hall had no audience seats, only a polished floor and a mirror along one wall. From the ceiling hung two long strips of blue silk. The performer stood between them while a supervisor watched from beside the mat. She spoke to him briefly, nodded and began. I remained beyond the marked area with the accompanist.

The cloth climbed around her in a quiet blue spiral. For a moment she seemed to be dressing the air rather than lifting herself through it. Then her body opened sideways, a comma suspended in a sentence nobody below could finish. The silk tightened into two clean lines above her, making the space around her look extravagantly empty. The accompanist’s hand stopped over the keys. She turned slowly, and the mirror offered a second impossible body, equally calm and equally without a floor.

When she returned to the mat, the supervisor spoke and she listened with one hand on the cloth. The accompanist played the passage again at a different pace. She tried one small part of the movement before resting. From the doorway, the blue strips looked soft and ordinary once more. Their stillness did not help me understand what I had just seen.

Choose three powerful words or phrases from the extract above. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the performer’s movement during the rehearsal.

Write about 200 to 250 words.