The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his hands, wide-palmed and precise, and the habit of tracing coastlines before she trusted them.

Every map he left her was already wrong— rivers had shifted, the mountain pass renamed for someone else's war. Still she keeps them flat beneath glass, the way you press a flower past its season.

She learned distance as a language: how far the legend says one inch means, how far the truth bends under weight. Her father measured the world in parallels. She measures it in the space between calls home.

The blank parts of old maps said *here be dragons*, meaning: we ran out of knowing. She thinks of him now in the unnamed margins, in the white that was never empty, only unasked.

Somewhere a cartographer's daughter is still drawing rivers from memory, giving them names no atlas holds.