Below the Line

In double-entry bookkeeping, red is the color of what is owed. Here the red rule has become a waterline, and ordinary life — strollers, bicycles, shopping bags — happens entirely beneath it, in the teal of submersion. The bubbles rising from the figures were specified as breath; the model rendered them as circled numbers, and the metaphor completed itself: their breathing is extraction. One gray figure touches the line. Above it: sums, drifting like weather that belongs to someone else.