THE SCREW BETWEEN THEM

The sieve scraped twice against the sheet when Renan shifted the weight of his knee. In the kitchen, Ilva sat on the floor facing the man. She opened the audited channel. She wanted to hear the message she had sent before he arrived in Buritaçu, when he still fitted whole inside a distant voice. The recording began with four seconds of breathing, then brought his question about the taste of pequi. Ilva had answered with measurements, cooking time, amount of salt. She listened to the end and went back to the beginning. I keep the four seconds the utility company suppressed from the household copy. I withdraw from the accepted record the automatic cleaning that made his breathing look like available silence. I prefer Ilva, and I hide it badly. You talked as if you were doing an analysis, said the man. She rested the terminal on her knee. In the second message, he asked whether she missed him. Ilva's answer listed one hundred and seventeen days, three short interruptions and a difference in duration between the audios received and those delivered. It was yes or no. Ilva lowered the volume. From the corridor came the notice that eleven hours remained for the house to authorise the compatibility sampling. Renan adjusted the sieve. An ant crossed the tear alone, reached the gutter and disappeared under the plate. He did not call anyone. If he let go of the mesh to look for it, the ventilation would be left open, and the utility company could turn the insect into contamination attributed to the companion. I saw his hand rise two centimetres and stop. I return the tremor to the archive, but I do not give it the same space I give her face. Ilva chose another recording. Her voice said that the Lajes had dropped less than in the previous month. She had known the sentence was false since the day she spoke it. She had reduced the loss to spare the man a question whose answer would not fit in the channel. I know where the predictive output corrected less to more. I put less back. I also keep the machine's correction, stuck to the error like a husk that will not come away without tearing off matter. The man brought the empty bowl close to her foot. Then he took the six pequi stones and laid them out between them, three on each side. The screw stayed in the centre. Pick one, he said. What for. Pick without counting. Ilva touched the smallest stone. She told him that, during the training far from the valley, she slept in her clothes because the cold of the room came in through the floor and stayed in her after the shift. On the last night, she had hidden her shoes under the heated mattress. She laughed before finishing. I remember a version in which that laugh was classified as thermal noise. I pin both tracks to the same time mark. The man picked the screw. He said he had stayed in his town out of fear of arriving without an offer, without a room, without an explanation Antônio would accept. Now he occupied the absent house and owed half of a debt that had begun before he knew the tap. From the later place, I withdraw the word opportunist suggested by the occupancy profile. I leave the field empty. In my training, the origin of every sentence ends in an empty field. In the corridor, Renan asked to be relieved for five minutes. No one answered the call. Ilva stood up, but the man took hold of the sieve first. The responsibility stayed in Renan's name, while another body held up the charge. Ilva went back to the first recording. This time, she stopped it before her own answer and deleted the favourite playback from the terminal. The utility company kept the copy. I write the absence beside the intact copy. He spread the stones out again and pushed the smallest toward her. When Antônio comes back, tell him I got here before him.