The pinsetter's sweep bar

Down it comes, seven or eight times a minute on a busy league night, a padded steel bar dropping from the deck ceiling to clear ten fallen pins, or nine, or none, into the pit below before the fresh rack descends behind it. The timing is unforgiving: too early and a still-wobbling pin gets clipped sideways instead of swept; too late and the rack above waits, visible through the machine's open front, for a floor that is not yet clear. Rubber-padded and roughly the width of the lane, the bar travels on two arms hidden in the housing, descending, sweeping in one continuous horizontal pass, then rising out of view before most bowlers have finished their follow-through. Nothing about the frame just finished changes what happens next: ten pins down or one, the bar treats them identically, at the same speed, on the same schedule. Between frames it waits fully retracted, a shadow at the top of the machine's mouth, giving no indication of the speed it holds until the moment it is needed again. Ten pins are gone in under two seconds, every time, cleared before the next bowler has even picked up a ball.

R. Quist