Batro sat in the armchair by the fire while his wife played the piano in front of him. The atmosphere created through the instrument’s valves was dense and heavy, and the notes were sad, melancholic, and miserable.

The slow and rhythmic cadence, accompanied by soft touches of low sounds, filled the room, and the man, tired from the day’s work, began to squint his eyes, covered by his long bangs, while his arms hung down on both sides of the armchair. His hair, as reddish as his wife’s, reached his shoulders and almost looked like a mop due to its neglect. Lavidia had thought about fixing it, but she hadn’t found the time or the motivation to do so.

In the north, she found the distance she needed and was no longer exposed to the comments or stares of people she knew. There, she met other people who undoubtedly assumed what was happening to her, as it was not normal for a woman in the prime of her maturity to be on a construction site every day. But at least she wasn’t obliged to answer anything. In fact, she rejected living with her grandmother and other women precisely for that reason and stayed in a secluded place where she lived alone with Batro.

Nevertheless, sadness and bitterness did not leave her, and when she wasn’t in the excavation itself, she tried to escape with the hobby that she had always held in high esteem, namely, the piano.

The melody was already entering its final parts, and at the moment she played one of the resonant and last notes, Batro lifted his gaze to his wife, and it was then that he saw it. The device probably entered through the window while they were ventilating and stayed there, suspended, hanging from a shelf. Unfolded, it was the size of a human head, although the main body was no larger than a closed fist. But it wasn’t still. A small oscillating appendage seemed to follow Lavidia’s hands as they moved across the multicoloured keyboard.

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Batro got on guard and stood up, and at that moment, the appendage turned toward his position, although for now, the object still hung from the shelf. But suddenly, it detached, left the shelf’s surroundings, and, suspended in the air, began to move toward the pianist.

The man didn’t hesitate, and, as if driven by a spring, grabbed a nearby broom and struck the device with all his might. The object immediately fell to the floor, and he continued to strike it frantically until his wife stopped him:

“No, Batro! What are you doing? Drop that broom!”

The man obeyed and returned to the armchair, watching that shiny metal form with wide-open eyes and not entirely trusting.

One of those strange appendages kept rotating despite the blows until, after a few moments, it stopped, and the lights that had just come on stopped flashing.

Lavidia used the same broom to touch it because she had never seen anything like that. The object moved lifelessly on the floor, driven by the stick, and the woman could see that its weight was minimal. In the end, she decided to pick it up with one hand, and indeed, despite its apparent hardness, it was nothing more than a small scrap now. For sure, it had stopped working due to the displacement of some of its internal components when it fell to the ground or was hit.

Too bad Labra, her grandmother, had left to solve a technical problem regarding some structures that had arisen in a neighbouring community. Surely, she could give her a reason for what that strange object was. She would ask her when she returned, she thought, and she proceeded to store it in a closet.

“Come on, Batro, to bed. Tomorrow awaits us a hard day. You will do as usual, but they have put me in charge of everything.”