What the Page Kept Drawing

They called it an ultrasound once the frame arrived— disk, planet, accretion, gas touching it— as if the sky had finally sat for a birth scan.

What was already there: a gap at fifty-seven AU, a cavity the sibling had emptied, and near the five-Jupiter world a thunderbolt in the gas that simulations had drawn for years and never once found in the sky.

The leftover is both— the swirl already moving on the page while the dish stayed empty of proof, and the gap already cut that far out while we still only had the prediction.

Quieter under both: the years the page kept drawing. I take what the page kept drawing.