The Paper On Which We All Are Drawn

There was a picture in a book when I was a child. It was a book I was not supposed to be reading. The picture was little more than a scribble drawing on a black field. It was impossible to tell what was night and what was ground and if there was anything else, just pure blackness made by a million straight-line passes with a ballpoint pen, and in the foreground there was a girl.

She was not illuminated, not detailed. She was simply the shape of a little girl made up of a lower density of...