After the Press

The press stopped.

Nineteen seconds.

That was the official number, later, on a form that used the word incident as if it were a weather type.

Ivo had been on the left station. The sound was not a bang. It was a refusal. Metal deciding not to complete a thought.

Bela, opposite, had her hand in the safe envelope. She pulled it back so fast she sat down on the floor and then looked offended at the floor for being there.

“I’m fine,” she said, to the air, to Ivo, to the press.

The line halted. The supervisor arrived with the walk of someone who needed the halt to be shorter than a rumor.

Forge Mutual’s on-call assessor came in a coat too clean for the hall. He listened to the press as if it might confess.

“No structural. Safety envelope held. Restart approved.”

Ivo stared at him.

“She was in it.”

“The envelope held.”

“That’s not the same as nothing happening.”

The assessor made a note that would not contain this sentence.

They were given ten minutes. Canteen. Soup. The soup tasted of the canteen.

Bela sat with her hands around the bowl and did not drink.

“If you ask if I’m fine again I’ll throw this,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. You’re a bad liar anyway.”

The hall noise came back in layers. Other presses. A joke too loud. Someone turning up a radio that was not supposed to exist.

Ivo went to the locker and found his hands were performing the shutdown sequence without a machine.

On restart he stood at the left station and waited for the sound.

It did not come.

The press did the next thousand operations like an animal that had only been thinking.

At the end of shift the supervisor asked Ivo to sign that he had no remaining concern.

Ivo signed, because remaining concern was not a box the form believed in, and because Bela had already signed, and because the Foundry had a way of turning un-signed men into stories.

They walked out together into the district’s night heat.

“I’m going to dream about it,” Bela said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t visit. I don’t want to talk in a kitchen.”

“I was going to send a stupid message.”

“Send it. Just not a philosophy.”

Ivo sent: Soup was wrong. Press was worse. See you Thursday.

She sent back a sticker of a crane dropping a crate onto a tiny man. The tiny man was smiling. Ivo decided this was healthy.

Thursday, the press ran.

Bela hummed off-key, which she only did when she had decided to stay.

Ivo listened for nineteen seconds at the start of the shift, then stopped listening on purpose, which was also a kind of skill.

The hall did not become innocent.

It became workable.

In the Foundry that was the adult word for fine.