The paint shaker

A gallon can, locked down under a lever in the paint shaker, endures roughly seven hundred oscillations a minute, a distance of perhaps three-quarters of an inch back and forth, for the ninety seconds a clerk has judged sufficient to undo a month of settling. The sound is not subtle. It carries through the store's concrete floor and into the aisle two rows over, a rattling clatter that stops abruptly and without ceremony when the timer ends, the can wrenched from the jaws still faintly warm. Inside, in ways no customer will see, a steel ball or two, added at the counter, has spent the ninety seconds crashing through the can's contents to break up pigment that has fallen out of suspension into a dense sediment no hand-stirring would reliably lift. The machine has no setting for color, no memory of the last can, and no opinion on whether the customer chose well. It knows only vibration and duration, applied identically to eggshell white and a deep barn red, to a pint and to a gallon, provided the clamp can close around it. Clerks nearby have developed a tolerance for the noise that visitors have not; a first-time customer standing near the machine at the ninety-second mark will visibly startle when it stops. The can, once removed, sloshes faintly for a few seconds more before settling into whatever uniform color it has finally, briefly, achieved.

R. Quist