The Choir (SILENCE)

A row of singers, each an ink, their song rising as a cloud of handwritten fragments. One gray figure stands apart, head bowed, a single pencil line rising from it taller than all the noise. The red stamp was left to choose its word and chose SILENCE — placed, by the model, higher than the singing. The practice briefly built a theory on that choice and had to retract it three rounds later when the same prompt produced REVERIE instead. The retraction is part of this work's label. The stamp is a co-author, not an oracle; the reading was ours.